Don’t put all the blame on Westbrook

Russell Westbrook should never take 33 shots a game, but he can't be judged on that alone. (AP)

Russell Westbrook takes too many shots. This is indisputable, no matter what the Westbrook apologists might say. No player, save perhaps Michael Jordan at his peak, should be using 35 percent of his team’s possessions via a shot attempt, turnover or drawn foul, as the Thunder point guard is doing in these playoffs. That usage rate is higher than Kevin Durant’s and would have been the highest in the league in the regular season.

Westbrook is a very good player, but he is not this good.

That’s the easy part. The harder part is diagnosing why Westbrook takes too many shots, and that’s where the black-and-white “Westbrook is selfish!” and “Westbrook is a dumb player!” arguments fall short and fail to consider all the things going on away from the ball. There are possessions in which Westbrook makes bad decisions and takes bad shots, and those are the plays we remember most clearly when evaluating a complicated player like this.

The Thunder’s possession with about 1:30 left in regulation of Monday’s epic Game 4 in Memphis is a great example — and it’s one of the worst possessions  you’ll ever see an NBA team run, at least in terms of creativity. Westbrook crosses midcourt with 17 seconds remaining on the shot clock and his four teammates spread out to the sidelines, two to his left and two to his right, almost like a four corners-style.  And then everyone stands around, doing nothing. Westbrook keeps dribbling, everyone else keeps standing and the shot clock keeps ticking. When it gets to five seconds, Westbrook pulls up for a long two-point jumper with O.J. Mayo’s hand in his face. It misses.

Whose fault is that? Is it coach Scott Brooks’ fault for either failing to call a play or not preparing his team for a crucial possession? Or has Westbrook broken off the play and decided to do things on his own? What about those four other guys, a group that includes Durant? Should they be doing more?

This is not an isolated incident, as Sebastian Pruiti breaks down here in great detail. The Thunder’s late-game offense suffers bouts of stand-still predictability, and Westbrook is often the one to bail them out.

He’s not blameless, though, because he often opts against easy passes in favor of taking a tougher shot himself. The best example comes at the 4:25 mark of the fourth quarter, when the Thunder run a high pick-and-roll with Westbrook and Nazr Mohammed. Mayo chases Westbrook over the screen as Mohammed’s man (Marc Gasol) sags back, trying to keep Westbrook out of the lane. Westbrook gets there anyway, and when he arrives inside the foul line, three Memphis defenders surround him. Among that group is Mike Conley, who has left James Harden wide open in the left corner to help on Westbrook in the paint.

With apologies to Westbrook, any good point guard makes the pass to Harden here, especially with 13 ticks left on the shot clock. Harden is calling for the ball and the passing lane is open. But Westbrook forces up a floater that Gasol deflects on the way up. It’s a bad shot, one of the shaky possessions that helped Memphis erase another late-game deficit.

This kind of thing will happen three or four times in every Thunder game. Westbrook is 22; he’s learning how to distribute the ball. Of note on this possession: Mohammed and Westbrook, as the pick-and-roll team, obviously move quite a bit, but the other three Thunder players just stand around. Again, whose fault is that?

The misconception about the Thunder’s late-game offense is that the team isn’t running plays — or that Westbrook is breaking those plays to isolate. That’s wrong. The Thunder are (usually) running plays, but they’re either running them very late in the shot clock or running them without a backup plan — or both. The result is that if defenses are able to stymie that first action, one of the Thunder’s stars is left holding the ball with the shot clock running down and a bunch of inactive teammates watching. Because Westbrook is the team’s nominal point guard, he’s often left to create for himself in bad situations.

Take the first two Thunder possessions from the last minute of regulation. Both involve Durant coming off screens on the wing and curling up toward the three-point arc to either take a pass from Westbrook or continue his cut and set a pick for Westbrook. Kendrick Perkins serves as a screener for Durant on both plays, and his guy (Gasol) sees each play developing, jumps off Perkins and cuts off the initial passing lane to Durant. When Durant then sets a screen for Westbrook and pops toward the sideline for a jumper, Gasol continues tracking him, mucking up the passing lanes and leaving Westbrook with no other option but to drive.

Each play doesn’t really start until half the shot clock has expired, and each involves two Thunder players (Harden and Daequan Cook on the first, Harden and Thabo Sefolosha on the second) doing nothing other than standing around waiting for a possible kick-out pass.

Gasol is a smart player, but he shouldn’t be able to disrupt an entire possession simply by taking away a passing lane or two. He’s not Kevin Garnett or Dwight Howard.

The general point is that there is a complex dynamic going on here – one that combines a scorer working as a point guard, a group of young players learning to move without the ball, a superstar scorer (Durant) who struggles at times to free himself from stronger defenders, and a playbook that is probably among the simpler ones in the league.

That playbook is generally fine. The Thunder ranked fifth in points per possession this season, they get to the line like crazy and they run very calculated (if simple) plays designed to take advantage of the attention their superstars draw and the space they create off the ball for teammates. It took the Heat’s much more accomplished perimeter stars — perhaps the two greatest players in the league — a season of fits and starts to learn how best to use each other and work off the ball. Should we be surprised that two college-aged kids and a bunch teammates in their early- and mid-20s are still working out the kinks on offense? Not everyone can run the triangle offense, and it’s not a coincidence that Boston’s offense, for instance, has become increasingly more creative as its scorers have gotten older and less able to score in isolation. The Thunder have two great individual talents around whom Brooks revolves much of his offense.

This is a league of learning, and the Thunder — and Westbrook — have a lot of learning left to do. And Westbrook is learning. He ate up the Grizzlies in transition on Monday, and he tossed a few nice kick-out passes to Cook and Harden in the corners — the very passes he misses too often. He takes some bad shots, and the Thunder are too dependent on their two stars. But they’re young, and they’re already two wins away from the conference finals. That’s the bigger picture here, and that’s a scary picture for the rest of the league.