The guard brought a complicated mix of good and bad to the Lakers. He and the team are better off now that he has been traded away.
It was a rocky ride for nearly a year-and-a-half, but it’s hard to be unmoved by the sincerity of Russell Westbrook’s final public comments as a Laker., coach Darvin Ham decided against subbing him in — a decision several key people in the locker room, including Ham, would later second-guess after the game got away. Westbrook was not on the bench for much of the fourth quarter as the game was ending.
When asked for clarity — if he had been in the tunnel on the bike — Westbrook laughed, as he often did when being asked something he didn’t like by reporters . Of course he was on the bike, he said. After some back-and-forth, he laid out what seems now like a personal credo of how he believes teammates should conduct themselves.
“I’ve been all-in since Day 1,” he said. “I’m a very supportive guy and teammate since I’ve been in this league. I compete every night, I do my job. When they ask of me, I go out and compete. I make no complaints, I do what I need to do. I’m grateful for an opportunity. If my number’s called, I’m always ready, and if not, I sit there and get warm, because I wanna make sure I have an opportunity.”
That’s how Westbrook, the 34-year-old MVP, wishes to be regarded: a good teammate, a leader and an example to the locker room. The confounding, difficult legacy of his tenure with the Lakers is that he often was these things — but his erratic play, his brash and combative nature and his inability to course-correct or adjust his on-court style clashed with the impression he wished to give., the lasting legacy of Westbrook’s tenure as a Laker is, of course, tied into the team’s record.
Even this season, after a year of troubleshooting, the LeBron James-Anthony Davis-Westbrook trio carried just a 1.6 net rating in their meager 299 minutes together — hardly the blockbuster results the Lakers imagined when they sent
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