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2020-21 NBA Offseason thread: Officially a wrap
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by nick.,
- Start date
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What if Houston ends up with...
Jarred Allen / D. Cousins
P. Tucker / R. Covington
Caris Levert / G green
Spencer Dinwiddie / Eric Gordon
John Wall
Where would they rank in the West?
Jarred Allen / D. Cousins
P. Tucker / R. Covington
Caris Levert / G green
Spencer Dinwiddie / Eric Gordon
John Wall
Where would they rank in the West?
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Russell Westbrook trade: Let me tell you about Westbrook
With the John Wall-for-Russell Westbrook trade now official, Fred Katz offers an introduction to the guy he covered in OKC for 2-plus years.
theathletic.com
someone summarize por favor
ALso, Gap Year was OK but not worth paying for IMO. It's like something that should come on before a double header or something.
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10th pick
moe200069
Supporter
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petitioning to be moved into the Eastern Conference
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Only ahead of OKC.
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converse -chucks,
Adidas - sambas/campus
Puma - glydes
all cost like $60 and under
lemme find out some yall out here still wearing shoes like this
"still"
Since when does NT shop at Hot Topic?
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John Wall being Houston's pitch to keep Harden happy is ******* hilarious
antidope
Supporter
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And me.
antidope
Supporter
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Russell Westbrook trade: Let me tell you about Westbrook
With the John Wall-for-Russell Westbrook trade now official, Fred Katz offers an introduction to the guy he covered in OKC for 2-plus years.
someone summarize por favor
ALso, Gap Year was OK but not worth paying for IMO. It's like something that should come on before a double header or something.
Let me tell you about the guy I covered for two-plus years in Oklahoma City.
Russell Westbrook is not actually a righty. He may shoot with his right hand, but Westbrook does just about everything else with his left. He writes lefty, bowls lefty — and says, at least as of a couple years ago, that his high score is an impressive 279. For some reason, he shoots with his weaker hand. But his true self comes out every once in a while.
Near the end of his MVP season in 2017, a reporter from ESPN, Chris Herring, noticed Westbrook had slanted to his secretly dominant hand more than ever. The triple-double machine was going left almost three-quarters of the time that he drove to the hoop. Herring traveled to Oklahoma City to ask the nine-time All-Star, now the newest member of the Washington Wizards, about the tendency.
He closed a media availability following the morning shootaround with his question.
Why was Westbrook going left on 73 percent of his drives?
“People send me left, man,” Westbrook started. He ended the answer with a typical, Westbrookian tell: “Maybe they think it’s better for them if I go left,” he said. “I have no idea.”
Uh oh.
If you knew Westbrook, you knew what was going to happen hours later, when the Thunder took the court.
The scrum of reporters ended shortly after Westbrook’s response. Herring had brought a sheet of printed-out data and offered it to the point guard. Westbrook grabbed it, peered down at the numbers for no more than a couple of seconds, then — clearly realizing he was getting too chummy — proclaimed for the room to hear, “I don’t want it,” and gave it back.
So, what happened that night? The memory may exaggerate slightly — after all, basketball lore has a way of amplifying the greats’ most in-character moments — but Westbrook must have gone right every, single time. Each reporter who was present for that morning’s scrum and at the game that evening noticed it in the moment. And he dominated.
See, Herring thought he was merely asking Westbrook about an on-court tendency. But that’s not how Westbrook processes this kind of information. To him, it was a slight. The numbers may say Westbrook doesn’t go right, but Westbrook interpreted them as saying he can’t go right. You know that viral moment from The Last Dance, the Michael Jordan documentary that swept the basketball world six months ago, when something not-so-personal occurred before Jordan declared, “I took it personal,” then ripped out hearts, throats and eyes?
That’s how Westbrook approaches basketball, too. That is what the Wizards are getting in their newest point guard, whom they acquired Wednesday night for John Wall and a protected 2023 first-round pick.
He talks trash not just during games but throughout shooting drills with teammates. Former Thunder coach Billy Donovan once said he had to lock the doors to the team’s practice facility on an off-day just to make sure his point guard would actually rest. (There’s no word on if Westbrook showed up with bolt cutters.) He is more detail-oriented than anyone who judges him purely by his chaotic playing style would guess. He used to iron and starch his own t-shirts in his dorm room when he was a student at UCLA. His locker is always as organized as Felix Unger’s apartment. He’s not social before games. He has work coming up.
The Wizards locker room is about to be like this.
Westbrook has a way, for better or for worse, of rubbing off on every team for which he plays. The Wizards have talked year after year about culture. During the latter Ernie Grunfeld years, it was about fixing a broken locker room. Coach Scott Brooks and players have mentioned how the team from two years ago wasn’t a good “fit,” as Brooks put it. In not-as-nice terms, the personalities didn’t mesh. They didn’t play hard.
They spent last year, Tommy Sheppard’s first year as GM, lusting after guys who fit a specific description. To use Sheppard’s words, “We’re data-driven and character-driven.” Brooks talked all season about how refreshing it was to coach a squad that he never had to tell to play hard. The sub 6-foot Brooks churned out a decade-long NBA career because of the way he scrapped. He gravitates to those kinds of players. He coached Westbrook from 2008 to 2015 in Oklahoma City and was an assistant before that. The two remain close. Brooks adores him. Westbrook fits the mold of player to which the coach gravitates.
Westbrook wasn’t a highly ranked high-school recruit. In fact, he was so anonymous during his initial season at UCLA that one time, while sitting in the bleachers at the Wooden Center, a gym on campus where students would frequently play pickup, a regular Joe he didn’t know started talking trash to him from the court. The guy was talented and recognized Westbrook as the guy from the Bruins’ bench who never saw the floor.
“You think you’re all that!” he yelled to Westbrook. “You ain’t trying to play! You’re sitting there with your shoes off.”
Westbrook was in his own version of relaxed mode, seemingly chilling out in one of those oversized, starched-and-ironed white T’s with Vans, instead of playing shoes, on his soles. Of course, as someone who knows him well once told me, “When Russ is at work, he’s at work.”
And he was most definitely at work.
Westbrook didn’t say much in response (the people truly close with him say that if he’s trash talking, you’re in the clear; when he goes quiet is when you know you’ve really pissed him off), borrowed someone else’s playing shoes, started against the dude one-on-one and absolutely annihilated him.
Dunking on him. Banging jumpers. The works.
“He killed him,” Westbrook’s college teammate, Mustafa Abdul-Hamid, who was there for the evisceration, told me years ago. “Then he took the shoes off, looked at him, went ‘Hehehe’ and walked off. And everyone in the gym was just cracking up.”
Westbrook has hardly churned every culture he’s graced into gold. The Kevin Durant situation in Oklahoma City was, at best, uncomfortable. The James Harden pairing lasted only a year before they both asked out. The 2016-17 squad, the one that watched him win an MVP and become the first NBA player in 55 years to average a triple-double in a single-season, was a one-man show. Westbrook embraced a fitting theme song that year, Lil Uzi Vert’s “Do What I Want.” He got along well with Carmelo Anthony and Paul George, but those teams convinced themselves they had an on/off switch that they never actually turned on.
Locker room perfection, however, is not the point.
The Wizards have talked about culture for years. And now, they’re bringing in someone whose gravitas is unlike that of anyone else they’ve employed. For good or bad, this team just renovated its personality again. There is only one Russell Westbrook.
Russell Westbrook is not actually a righty. He may shoot with his right hand, but Westbrook does just about everything else with his left. He writes lefty, bowls lefty — and says, at least as of a couple years ago, that his high score is an impressive 279. For some reason, he shoots with his weaker hand. But his true self comes out every once in a while.
Near the end of his MVP season in 2017, a reporter from ESPN, Chris Herring, noticed Westbrook had slanted to his secretly dominant hand more than ever. The triple-double machine was going left almost three-quarters of the time that he drove to the hoop. Herring traveled to Oklahoma City to ask the nine-time All-Star, now the newest member of the Washington Wizards, about the tendency.
He closed a media availability following the morning shootaround with his question.
Why was Westbrook going left on 73 percent of his drives?
“People send me left, man,” Westbrook started. He ended the answer with a typical, Westbrookian tell: “Maybe they think it’s better for them if I go left,” he said. “I have no idea.”
Uh oh.
If you knew Westbrook, you knew what was going to happen hours later, when the Thunder took the court.
The scrum of reporters ended shortly after Westbrook’s response. Herring had brought a sheet of printed-out data and offered it to the point guard. Westbrook grabbed it, peered down at the numbers for no more than a couple of seconds, then — clearly realizing he was getting too chummy — proclaimed for the room to hear, “I don’t want it,” and gave it back.
So, what happened that night? The memory may exaggerate slightly — after all, basketball lore has a way of amplifying the greats’ most in-character moments — but Westbrook must have gone right every, single time. Each reporter who was present for that morning’s scrum and at the game that evening noticed it in the moment. And he dominated.
See, Herring thought he was merely asking Westbrook about an on-court tendency. But that’s not how Westbrook processes this kind of information. To him, it was a slight. The numbers may say Westbrook doesn’t go right, but Westbrook interpreted them as saying he can’t go right. You know that viral moment from The Last Dance, the Michael Jordan documentary that swept the basketball world six months ago, when something not-so-personal occurred before Jordan declared, “I took it personal,” then ripped out hearts, throats and eyes?
That’s how Westbrook approaches basketball, too. That is what the Wizards are getting in their newest point guard, whom they acquired Wednesday night for John Wall and a protected 2023 first-round pick.
He talks trash not just during games but throughout shooting drills with teammates. Former Thunder coach Billy Donovan once said he had to lock the doors to the team’s practice facility on an off-day just to make sure his point guard would actually rest. (There’s no word on if Westbrook showed up with bolt cutters.) He is more detail-oriented than anyone who judges him purely by his chaotic playing style would guess. He used to iron and starch his own t-shirts in his dorm room when he was a student at UCLA. His locker is always as organized as Felix Unger’s apartment. He’s not social before games. He has work coming up.
The Wizards locker room is about to be like this.
Westbrook has a way, for better or for worse, of rubbing off on every team for which he plays. The Wizards have talked year after year about culture. During the latter Ernie Grunfeld years, it was about fixing a broken locker room. Coach Scott Brooks and players have mentioned how the team from two years ago wasn’t a good “fit,” as Brooks put it. In not-as-nice terms, the personalities didn’t mesh. They didn’t play hard.
They spent last year, Tommy Sheppard’s first year as GM, lusting after guys who fit a specific description. To use Sheppard’s words, “We’re data-driven and character-driven.” Brooks talked all season about how refreshing it was to coach a squad that he never had to tell to play hard. The sub 6-foot Brooks churned out a decade-long NBA career because of the way he scrapped. He gravitates to those kinds of players. He coached Westbrook from 2008 to 2015 in Oklahoma City and was an assistant before that. The two remain close. Brooks adores him. Westbrook fits the mold of player to which the coach gravitates.
Westbrook wasn’t a highly ranked high-school recruit. In fact, he was so anonymous during his initial season at UCLA that one time, while sitting in the bleachers at the Wooden Center, a gym on campus where students would frequently play pickup, a regular Joe he didn’t know started talking trash to him from the court. The guy was talented and recognized Westbrook as the guy from the Bruins’ bench who never saw the floor.
“You think you’re all that!” he yelled to Westbrook. “You ain’t trying to play! You’re sitting there with your shoes off.”
Westbrook was in his own version of relaxed mode, seemingly chilling out in one of those oversized, starched-and-ironed white T’s with Vans, instead of playing shoes, on his soles. Of course, as someone who knows him well once told me, “When Russ is at work, he’s at work.”
And he was most definitely at work.
Westbrook didn’t say much in response (the people truly close with him say that if he’s trash talking, you’re in the clear; when he goes quiet is when you know you’ve really pissed him off), borrowed someone else’s playing shoes, started against the dude one-on-one and absolutely annihilated him.
Dunking on him. Banging jumpers. The works.
“He killed him,” Westbrook’s college teammate, Mustafa Abdul-Hamid, who was there for the evisceration, told me years ago. “Then he took the shoes off, looked at him, went ‘Hehehe’ and walked off. And everyone in the gym was just cracking up.”
Westbrook has hardly churned every culture he’s graced into gold. The Kevin Durant situation in Oklahoma City was, at best, uncomfortable. The James Harden pairing lasted only a year before they both asked out. The 2016-17 squad, the one that watched him win an MVP and become the first NBA player in 55 years to average a triple-double in a single-season, was a one-man show. Westbrook embraced a fitting theme song that year, Lil Uzi Vert’s “Do What I Want.” He got along well with Carmelo Anthony and Paul George, but those teams convinced themselves they had an on/off switch that they never actually turned on.
Locker room perfection, however, is not the point.
The Wizards have talked about culture for years. And now, they’re bringing in someone whose gravitas is unlike that of anyone else they’ve employed. For good or bad, this team just renovated its personality again. There is only one Russell Westbrook.
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Three.
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Frank is better than Buddy Hield. But if it’s at the expense of Julius Randle, the French prince must be the sacrificial lamb.
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Bruh what. Son averaged 19 a game last year and shot 40% from three.
Frank won't score 19 in total until all star break
Frank won't score 19 in total until all star break
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Nah im just messing. I just don’t think Buddy is as good as advertised.
MVP
Supporter
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Should there be a bet that Harden is on Houston past the trade deadline?
Off to a rip roaring start
Off to a rip roaring start
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It'll probably be easier trading Harden in the off-season. You really can't do four for one trades mid-season. Plus you see how draft picks shake out.
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How this man got a peasy beard
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Interested in seeing how Fertitta strong arming him to stay works out for them...
They should still be a top 6 squad out West, on paper at least
akajae
formerly akajaedeuce
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MVP
Supporter
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Going to have to overcome the preseason crowning of Luka but I think he can pull off the double dip Giannis did last year.
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antidope
Supporter
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Something something LeBron cannibalism
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better at what?
