Thunder wise to give young All-Star Russell Westbrook five-year extension

Despite all the scrutiny, Russell Westbrook is only 23 and already ranks among the top 15 guys in the league. (Brett Deering/Getty Images)

Only LeBron James has received more scrutiny among NBA players over the last six months or so than Russell Westbrook. That scrutiny has focused mostly on Westbrook’s alleged inability to balance his desire for stardom with his basketball duty to pass the ball to Kevin Durant.

Generally overlooked amid the simmering Durant-Westbrook chatter is the fact that the Thunder have the most efficient offense in the league so far this season after ranking in the top five overall last season. The Thunder have issues, but scoring is not one of them. The Westbrook-Durant pairing, for all the warts and media hand-wringing, is leading the league’s best offense right now.

And so the Thunder did what any smart franchise would do: They locked up Westbrook with a five-year, max-level extension worth nearly $80 million. They’re confident that a guy who just turned 23 will continue to grow into the NBA’s most demanding position — a position the Westbrook did not play until he reached the pros. Westbrook did not wait until the end of the year to push for the pumped-up maximum deal he could have gotten under the new Derrick Rose rule (five years, $94 million), but regardless, the extension means the Thunder have about $48 million committed to just five players for 2013-14. James Harden, Serge Ibaka and Eric Maynor are less than a year away from being extension-eligible, and it’s an open question whether the Thunder can afford their entire core — a question that turns on how fast the luxury-tax level rises, and how healthy the Oklahoma City market is.

But you don’t preemptively answer that question by low-balling your second-best player. Someone was going to offer Westbrook a maximum deal, and though a rival team couldn’t match the Thunder’s hefty offer, Oklahoma City mitigated that issue by securing Westbrook for an extra season at something less than a Rose-level rate.

There are warts with Westbrook’s game, and they became clearer when you watch hours of tape of him on Synergy Sports, as I have over the last few weeks. Two stand out:

• He shoots too many jumpers early in the shot clock. These are bad shots, in part because Westbrook is a below-average jump-shooter, and in part because attempting a mid-range pull-up with 15 seconds on the shot clock means you have passed up the chance to work for a better shot. And with Durant and James Harden on your team, there are better shots available.

Westbrook doesn’t only do this because he likes to score; he does it because he hasn’t yet learned to exercise proper point guard patience on the pick-and-roll. On lots of pick-and-rolls, Westbrook will turn the corner and pick up his dribble right at the moment when he was just beginning to compromise the defense all over the court. Take one more dribble, prod a bit more, and all of sudden those shooters are wide open on the weak side and new interior passes materialize.

The best point guards do this prodding routinely, and it requires both patience and the ability pause, accelerate and change speeds on a dime. Westbrook isn’t there yet. He’s best operating at full speed and hasn’t quite learned to take the pick-and-roll as far as it can go. One can say the same thing about most young point guards, including Brandon Jennings.

The second flaw is related:

• He doesn’t consistently make the most complicated passes yet. If you’re in his line of vision — in the right corner as he drives down the right side of the lane — he’ll find you for a good look. But he’ll occasionally miss open guys across the court, bigs who have stealthily slipped open under the rim or shooters that have spotted up diagonally behind him — all outside his direct line of sight. More natural passers, including Harden, are instinctively better than Westbrook at seeing these passing lanes and tossing a pass at the right time.

To which I say: So what? Westbrook is only 23, and he already leads the league’s best offense. He can blow by anyone, create a shot any time he likes, and his ability to get to the foul line has been among the handful of key factors driving the Thunder’s scoring attack. Also, the limitations of Ibaka and Kendrick Perkins as roll men make Westbrook’s job more difficult. Ibaka remains an unsure cutter, and Perkins cannot be trusted to catch the ball on the move more than a few feet from the rim. The two combined can clog space and passing lanes.

Westbrook will get better, the Thunder’s late-game offense will get better and more diverse (a process already underway) and things will be fine in Oklahoma City. Every NBA team goes through crunch-time growing pains and spats now and then over shot selection. The Thunder will be no different, but they will be productive.

Westbrook’s positioning on defense can be an issue, but Oklahoma City is creeping up the defensive-efficiency rankings after a rough start, and this team played top-10-level defense after acquiring Perkins last season.

Really, this is a no-brainer for the Thunder, even if it comes with some cap complications. Oklahoma City will be well over the cap next season, but the real issues come after, when Ibaka, Harden and Eric Maynor can all enter restricted free agency if the Thunder haven’t extended them yet. Harden is developing into one of the league’s best all-around guards, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see some team toss $12 million annually, or more, at him. Ibaka is a defensive force still learning on the other end, but big guys who play defense get paid. If just these two net something like $23 million combined — and that may be conservative — the Thunder will have something like $70 million committed to six players in 2013-14 and 2014-15.

In related news: The luxury tax, something this team has never sniffed, is set just above $70 million for this season, and the penalties grow much harsher starting in 2013-14. The new collective bargaining agreement also jacks up those penalties for teams that pay the tax four times in any five-year span; even the Lakers and Mavericks are sweating a bit over those so-called repeater penalties.

The tax line will jump as league revenues jump, and it could be as high as $76 million or so by 2013-14, assuming 4 percent revenue growth. The Thunder can also shed more than $11 million in salary after 2014-15, when deals tied to Perkins and Nick Collison expire, so they could perhaps avoid paying too many years in a row. But the location of the tax line, the team’s financial success and its place within the league’s secret revenue-sharing program will all determine whether Oklahoma City can keep its entire core.

But that’s a decision for later. When you get a chance to lock up a 23-year-old who is already one of the league’s 15 best players, you do it.