Washington Wizards: Russell Westbrook is an enigma

Washington Wizards guard Russell Westbrook remains an enigma. He is both a superstar and a rotation player. A comet hurtling towards global destruction and a bright light in the night sky that passes harmlessly by.

His army of fans zealously defend his abilities against his detractors who point towards his deficiencies. As a player and topic, he elicits more positive and negative emotion than almost any player in history. However, the argument over whether he is a great player or a good player, or perhaps even a bad player misses the point. Russell Westbrook is an enigma. He’s all of those things at once.

Russell Westbrook has helped get the Washington Wizards back into the playoff picture. His style of play has long been polarizing, and here’s why.

Talent and value are not the same thing, and Russell Westbrook is perhaps the single greatest basketball example of this. His talent is absurd. At his peak, his talent was so great that it didn’t matter how he played basketball, he created value. Win shares are not a perfect statistic but they do a good job of capturing how valuable a player is and for a while, Westbrook was one of the league’s most valuable players by this measure.

From 2010-11 to 2017-18, Westbrook’s seven-year peak, he finished in the top-20 of win shares six times, the top-10 four times, the top-five three times, and snagged a third-place finish in 2015-16 when he secured his lone MVP. This is a Hall of Fame-worthy peak and Westbrook will go down as one of the best players of his generation and for good reason, he was simply awesome, but that doesn’t mean he was perfect.