All Ball Sports: Westbrook Targeting Clippers

KIng of Hermosa Los Angeles Kings player and Hermosa Beach resident Dustin Brown was honored by the City of Hermosa Beach Tuesday upon his retirement after 18 seasons and 1,296 games in the National Hockey League. Brown captained the team to the Stanley Cup Championships in 2012 and 2014. His number 23 is only the seventh Kings number to be retired. Photo by Ralph Doyle

by Paul Teetor

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Or, in this case, one team’s trash-talking pain in the butt is another team’s season-saving treasure.

We’re talking, of course, about Russell Westbrook, the selfish, petulant, entitled, once-great point guard who has spent the last two years destroying the Lakers’ chemistry and cohesion while keeping them out of the playoffs.

Now he’s walking across the hallway at the old Staples Center (also known as the Crypt), changing uniforms and taking aim at the Clippers chemistry and cohesion.

Destroying their chances to make the playoffs is going to be a little harder for him to pull off this time because the Clippers are a significantly better team than the Lakers. They have beaten the Lakers 13 of the last 15 times they played each other, and as of Sunday night they are in fourth place in the 15-team Western Conference while the Lakers are in 12th place.

Still, as far as him joining the Clippers goes, we’ve seen this movie before and we know the inevitable, sad ending. 

Clippers fans better get their double-ply handkerchiefs ready. They’re gonna need ‘em.

The story has a great premise – wayward hero comes home to save the day. Westbrook played prep ball at Leuzinger High School in Lawndale, and had two great years at UCLA before being drafted 4th overall and becoming an immediate star with the Oklahoma City Thunder and the NBA’s Most Valuable Player in 2017.

But that MVP season was more than half a decade ago, and a lot has changed in the intervening six years.

The Clippers are now his fifth team in the last five years – check that, make it his sixth team, if you count the Utah Jazz, who got him in a trade with the Lakers last week but were smart enough to never let him put on a Jazz uniform before buying out his contract and making him an unrestricted free agent, free to sign with any team other than the Lakers.        

Naturally, he immediately signed up with the Clippers, whose coach, Ty Lue, issued the mantra we’re sure to hear the rest of this season: “Let Russ be Russ.”

In other words, we’ll take the good things that he can still do along with the bad things he does and the truly ugly things he can do, like leading the league in turnovers and shooting less than 30 percent on 3-point shots. For the math-challenged, that means he misses more than 70 percent of his long-range shots. In the modern NBA game, that’s impossible to overcome but the Clippers are going to give it the old college try.

“Let Russ be Russ” is reminiscent of the “Let Trump be Trump” strategy formulated by former President Donald Trump’s top advisers, who gave up trying to get him to act like a responsible leader and ditch the insult-comic act just a few months into his single term. 

They finally fell back on the reasoning that since he had managed to get elected president once by acting like an unhinged lunatic – never mind that he actually lost the popular vote by 3 million – their best strategy going forward was to “Let Trump be Trump.”

Of course, we all know how well that worked out – invitations to a “will be wild” insurrection, a plot to overthrow the lawful election, multiple criminal investigations. The bright idea to “Let Russ be Russ” is sure to work out just as well.

Indeed, until this week, the best thing you could say about the Clippers front office is that they were smarter than the Lakers front office.

Not anymore.

Now they are about to repeat the same mistake the Lakers just had to pay through their nose to rectify: turning their team over to Westbrook.

By the very nature of the position, point guard is the most important player on the floor. He handles the ball most of the time, finds the open shooters, and makes the most basic decision more often than any other player: whether to pass or shoot.

The best point guards realize that their real job is to make their teammates better, to set them up in spots where they can succeed. Westbrook is not that type of player and never has been. For most of his career, he has used his otherworldly athleticism and relentless energy to set himself up for crazy outside shots or bull-rushes to the basket where he can leap over, around and through the opposing defense.

In OKC, he drove fellow superstar Kevin Durant so crazy with his style of play that Durant got the hell out of Dodge as soon as he could. In Houston he couldn’t co-exist with superstar James Harden, and in Washington he couldn’t co-exist with semi-superstar Bradley Beal.

And of course we’ve all witnessed his last two years with the Lakers, where he couldn’t co-exist with superstars LeBron James and Anthony Davis to the point that LeBron insisted he be shipped out of town last week no matter what the cost in future draft picks it took to get a team like the Jazz to take him off their hands.

You’d think that being traded five times in five years might have set off some humbling thoughts in Westbrook’s mind: maybe I need to make a few changes to my game, adjust to my declining athleticism and tone it down a bit. But the man appears incapable of introspection – blaming everyone from LeBron to the media to the coach for his on-court Lakers troubles. He was so out-of-control last season that he got Frank Vogel – a championship winning coach – fired because he couldn’t get Westbrook to play the right way.

And this season he got into a locker room scuffle with Coach Darvin Ham two nights before he was traded to the Jazz in a deal that cost the Lakers their precious 2027 first round draft pick. All season long the Lakers had said they wouldn’t part with that draft pick for anything less than a superstar like Kyrie Irving. But Westbrook made himself so radioactive that the Lakers threw the pick into the deal just to convince the Jazz to take him off their hands.

That’s how badly LeBron, Coach Ham and the front office wanted Westbrook gone.

And the Clippers management team – owner Steve “Moneybags” Ballmer, President Lawrence Frank and Coach Lue – had a front row seat to all the craziness going on with their co-tenants and still signed him.

Huh?

In his very first game with the Clippers Friday night against the Sacramento Kings, the Clippers got the full “Let Russ be Russ” experience in a 176-175 double-overtime loss.

He scored 17 points and notched a dozen assists while controlling the ball most of the time he was on the floor. But he also set a Clippers record for players in their first game with an astounding seven turnovers. And every one of those turnovers was crucial to the loss in what turned out to be the second highest scoring game in NBA history.

The Clippers were leading by 11 points with 3:18 left. The game was a lock, right?

Not with Westbrook running the show. The Clippers turned the ball over four straight times – three by Westbrook on careless passes – and Sacramento cut the lead to 147-146.  A little later, with only 8.5 seconds left, Westbrook was guarding Malik Monk on the baseline as Monk set up to pass the ball in to De’Aaron Fox. Westbrook lost sight of Monk for a moment and Monk got the ball back from Fox and drained a three-pointer to send the game into overtime.

The Clippers fought their way into a second overtime period behind Kawhi Leonard – he scored a season-high 44 points – but in the end they couldn’t overcome Westbrook’s barrage of  turnovers and his unfocused defense. Once again, his insistence on trying to play hero ball and not simply be a playmaker and ball distributor cost his team a victory.

Having said all that, there actually is a case to be made that perhaps the Clippers made a smart move in signing Westbrook as a minimum salaried free agent.

Start with this: the Clippers gave up nothing to get him. He was a free agent available to sign with any team in the league except the Lakers.

So when it all goes bad – as it surely will – they can cut their losses with no regrets about what they gave up to get him.

In contrast, the Lakers gave up the guts of their 2020 title team to get him from the Wizards and by doing so paid a huge price for their foolishness.

By the way, the Lakers are 4-1 and making a definite playoff push since they jettisoned Westbrook. LeBron is playing harder than ever, and led his team back from a 27-point first-half deficit against the Dallas Mavericks on Sunday.  

Coincidence that the Lakers are suddenly playing like a team headed for the playoffs?

Nope.

Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. Follow: @paulteetor

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