Russell Westbrook having late-career renaissance in Denver fueled by unique chemistry with Nikola Jokic

Few NBA players have been labeled more extremely than Russell Westbrook has over the course of his 17-year career. He’s been called everything from the greatest athlete ever at the point guard position to a flat-out losing basketball player. 

For the last six or seven years, it’s been a lot more of the latter as Westbrook has been painted with one of the most unforgiving brushes imaginable. Even his successes, major ones, have been twisted into failures. 

When he averaged 27 points per game and made third-team All-NBA in his one season with the Rockets, all the talk was about how Houston had to trade its center (Clint Capela) and play small, five-out lineups just so Westbrook — who was starting to be considered useless as an off-ball player — could have a chance to be useful. 

When he led the league in assists and nearly cracked the top-10 in MVP voting in his one season with the Wizards, he caught the good-stats-bad-team bullet as everyone flocked to point out that Washington was actually better offensively, on paper, when Westbrook was off the court. 

In his year and a half with the Lakers, things got so bad for Westbrook that he didn’t even want his family at games. His home crowd was audibly groaning every time he rose up for a jump shot. He was scapegoated at every turn for a roster that was ill-conceived and constructed by Rob Pelinka, who should’ve known not to trade for Westbrook in the first place. 

Indeed, an aging Westbrook is a tough fit in a lot of situations. He can’t shoot, so playing off ball, as he was tasked with doing next to LeBron James, is a recipe for failure. But he’s also not good enough anymore, and hasn’t been for some time, to warrant on-ball control of an offense. So what do you do with him? It turns out, the answer to that question is pretty simple: Pair him with Nikola Jokic. 

Westbrook has been sensational this season in Denver, despite what his on-off splits say, and his chemistry with Jokic has been a root element of his successes. Entering play on Friday, Westbrook had delivered 84 assists to Jokic on the season, which is the third-highest total for any two-man combination in the league (trailing only Chris Paul’s 90 assists to Victor Wembanyama and Trae Young’s 91 to Jalen Johnson), per PBP Stats. 

It works the other way, too. 

It makes sense. Both these guys are elite passers, even if they do it in different ways. Jokic is a smooth, sixth-sense facilitator while Westbrook distributes more as a function of his force. But both are true assist-hunters as opposed to mere opportunists. 

Jokic is getting easy kick-out shots as Westbrook drags entire defenses to the rim with his crash-dummy drives, and plenty of buckets on soft rolls into the teardrop range the same way. Westbrook has been fully weaponized as a cutter off Jokic’s high-post quarterbacking. 

How about this hot-potato action in Friday’s win over Brooklyn:

It would be a discredit to everything Westbrook has brought to the Nuggets to suggest this is all a product of playing alongside Jokic, which, to be fair, would bring out the best in just about anyone. Westbrook has been impacting winning for a long time; it’s just become easy to forget that as the game has shifted to particularly punish his shooting deficiencies, which have been exacerbated by some poor situational fits. 

Now that things are lined up for him, look how genuinely happy this guy is — in this Denver situation in general, but also, fittingly, when he finds out that 74% of his NBA record 202 career triple-doubles have resulted in a win for his team. 

For a guy who has racked up such historic stats over the course of his career, it’s interesting that he’s always felt more like someone who impacts the game in ways less quantifiable. He’s an energy guy who, for a long time, just also happened to be a superstar. 

He’s not a superstar anymore, but he remains a nightly jolt of adrenaline for a Denver team with some pretty methodical DNA. The pace rises by more than four possessions per 48 minutes when he’s on the floor. Nobody plays, or has ever played, harder than Westbrook. 

That effort hasn’t always shown up in advanced columns. Cleaning the Glass numbers said the Nuggets were six points worse per 100 possessions when Westbrook was on the floor entering play on Friday, but that’s deceiving. He has played a lot of his minutes with bench lineups that rank among the worst in the league. Put him with Denver’s top guys and a those numbers look a lot different. 

After a 124-105 win over the Nets on Friday in which Westbrook recorded a triple-double of 25 points, 11 rebounds and 10 assists, the Nuggets are now 12-4 with Westbrook in the starting lineup. In NBA history, only two players have gone 9-2 or better with at least 90 assists and 25 steals through their first 11 starts with a new team: One was Baron Davis with the Warriors in 2004-05, and the other is Westbrook this season.

Westbrook is averaging just under 13 points, seven assists and five rebounds for the season — terrific numbers for just 27 minutes per game. But as his opportunities improve, so too does his production. Denver is 11-5 when he plays at least 30 minutes. 

As a starter, Westbrook is making almost 55% of his shots while averaging 8.3 assists and over two steals per game, which would rank sixth and fourth, respectively, among all players in the league. Whether or not he sticks as a starter when Aaron Gordon returns remains to be seen, but either way, he’s a sure bet to play major minutes moving forward for a Denver team that, in large part due to Westbrook, is still a force to be reckoned with when the top six or seven guys are clicking. And they have been for a while now, having won 11 of their last 16 to jump inside the West’s top four. 

Honestly, good for Russ. You can say what you want about him as a player (admittedly, I have pointed out a lot of his flaws over these last handful of years, and these imperfections have definitely shown up in worse ways in less complimentary contexts), but he has never stopped playing his ass off. 

And now he’s in a situation where he’s impacting winning, on both ends I might add, and being appreciated for many things he does well rather than killed for the few things he doesn’t. It’s a late-career moment that Westbrook has earned and wholly deserves after everything he’s endured in these final chapters of a Hall of Fame career, and any basketball fan with any sort of appreciation for the guys who lay it all on the line every single night has to be happy for him.