He came out of a solid Game 1, in scoring but also in attitude. Tonight ? Russell Westbrook has done pretty much the opposite of what is asked of a basketball player – making fouls, losing balls, and favoring sausage shipments over filoches. There’s a fire in the Westbrook house, and the focus is already set for Game 3 …
Rarely will a player have so much divided, and the least we can say is that Russell Westbrook is not doing anything to change that. Because the Brodie in the NBA is a bit of a roller coaster, with real beautiful memories sometimes but also with real pancakes when things go too fast. Efficient and very useful although expensive during Game 1 (24 points, 9 rebounds, 6 assists but 10/24 shooting and 5 stray bullets), the leader of the Rockets this time decided to do everything backwards, just to avoid us thinking too much when taking stock of his match. To make it short? Tonight ? It was a catastrophe, a 33-minute catastrophe. Come on, stats below, and we talk about it just below with a finger at the back of the throat:
10 points at 4/15 shooting including 1/7 from parking and 1/3 from throws, 13 rebounds, 4 assists, 2 steals and 7 stray balls in 33 minutes
A horror. Never in rhythm, contrasting with his teammates’ efforts to spin the ball until he found the right open shooter, Russell Westbrook played backwards all night. Too much haste brings stupidly lost balls, too much haste brings shots taken … ban too hastily, and every Rockets run was ultimately sacked by a bad decision from the Brodie. A linguistic match magnified at the start of the fourth quarter by Mike D’Antoni, who decided to leave his patient on the field despite his five faults, a smart decision if we imagine that all this was just a sham for him to take his sixth and finally quit this disaster, but above all a decision which generated half a dozen baskets collected by Houston because RW couldn’t fault, because RW couldn’t defend, even pretend. A hell of a thorn in the side of the Rockets who had yet done the job to return to the game and even lead by five points at the start of the last quarter, but this time (once again some dare) the former leader of the Thunder had chosen to defecate on a Playoffs match yet within the reach of his team, relaunching the eternal debate of the “legacy” of Brodie in postseason …
A magnificent season, which will have even pushed us sometimes … to wonder who was the real boss of the Rockets, then these sawtooth performances in Playoffs (to be polite) which remind us above all that Russell Westbrook remains a huge question mark human. The following ? It’s Wednesday night for Game 3, and the worst part is that we have absolutely no idea which version we will be entitled to.
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