Westbrook didn't do the things he usually does well, and he didn't do the things the Lakers need him to do well either. But that doesn't mean he did the things the Lakers are going to need him to do to win the title. On some level, that came on opening night.
If Westbrook is going to win a championship in Los Angeles, it is going to have to have to involve some degree of sacrifice.
The days of listless off-ball offense and undisciplined defense are over. These are not the 2016-17 Thunder and this is not the Russell Westbrook show. Throw in his poor defense and you have a player who doesn't fully seem to grasp what his role is on this team. It's too early to make any firm proclamations on how much of his nuclear athleticism he's lost at the age of 32, but at the very least, he doesn't look like he's going to have an easy time getting to the rim against the packed paints he's facing on this roster. He got to the rim only six times opening night and missed half of his looks there. There were signs of slippage last season, though, when his restricted attempts per game fell to only five after being above 10 in Houston. You trade for Westbrook in part because of how lethal he can be at the basket. It wasn't just the awkward off-ball fit, though. If he doesn't? He's got more games like tonight coming. He has 81 games left to figure that out before the postseason.
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Westbrook is so used to dominating possession of the ball that he hasn't learned how to effectively and consistently move without it. But why did Frank Vogel play him with Rajon Rondo, essentially relegating him to (ineffective) spacing duty on far too many possessions? Why wasn't he fully staggered with LeBron James, allowing each significant stretches of game time to run the offense? Westbrook wasn't put in a position to succeed as a playmaker on opening night, but he didn't do himself any favors on that front either. Some early ball-watching was to be expected when playing with the starters. Westbrook, who led the NBA in assists in three of the past four seasons, had only four against the Warriors. The problem on Tuesday was that the Lakers didn't get any of that other stuff. At his best, Westbrook is among the most exhausting players to play against in basketball, a lightning bolt in transition that punishes your rim-protectors and generates big plays through energy and ambition alone. You live with that because, most of the time, you get everything else. You just have to bake nights like that into your expectations with Westbrook. There's nothing all that unusual about Russell Westbrook shooting 1-of-7 from outside of the paint. Here are three takeaways from the win: 1. There was an error processing your subscription.
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