Why NBA History Will Laugh at Russell Westbrook's Critics

After 18 NBA seasons for seven different franchises, Russell Westbrook announced his retirement on Wednesday in a post on social media.

And now, the histrionics over one of the absolute best careers in NBA history will shift into overdrive.

For much of his almost two decades in the league—but especially for the seven years after his time with the Oklahoma City Thunder—Westbrook was as often a target of criticism as he was for praise.

If that more recent stretch is any indication, the criticism will survive long past Westbrook's retirement.

Much of it is fair (or at least grew out of traits worthy of critique). Westbrook's shot selection was, at times, shocking. When sharing the floor with legendary scorers like Kevin Durant, James Harden, LeBron James or Kawhi Leonard, he was prone to launching contested jumpers or driving into a crowd instead of keeping the ball moving.

On defense, he had lapses both on and off the ball that compromised his team's shell. He sometimes chased rebounds at the expense of the scheme, too.

A lot of his mistakes were the product of overzealousness, something that often seemed to ratchet up when he was in the postseason.

He was far from a perfect player, but that's really not the standard anyone is held up to in legacy talks (except, perhaps, Michael Jordan, LeBron James or the small handful of others who might be in or around the all-time top five).

Westbrook was a force-of-nature creator, distributor and scorer who often hustled beyond the point of others' exhaustion. Despite what his detractors have said (and will continue to say), the good generally outweighed the bad.

In basketball, the bottom line is whether or not your team scores more than the opponent. For his career, Russ' teams were plus-2.8 points per 100 possessions when he was on the floor and plus-0.1 when he was off.

You can't really pin the "empty calorie production" descriptor on him, when his teams generally won his minutes (something that was even clearer at his peak).

And in the absence of that, it's worth highlighting Westbrook's mind-bending accomplishments.

Perhaps most impressive is what he did from 2016-17 through 2020-21, when he averaged a triple-double in four of five seasons and was at 26.0 points, 10.3 rebounds and 10.1 assists for all five combined.

In 2016-17 alone, he put up 31.6 points, 10.7 rebounds and 10.4 assists with an above-average true shooting percentage and a massively positive net rating swing. He won MVP that year, and though it's often nitpicked now, the vote wasn't close.

In that campaign and the four that followed, Westbrook played 356 games and totaled 3,676 rebounds and 3,608 assists. Needless to say, no one else in league history matched or exceeded both of those marks in any 356-game span.

Time and the fact that he was on six different teams down the stretch of his career may have impacted our appreciation of that half-decade, but it was truly unlike anything we'd ever seen before, and it completely altered our perception of a triple-double.

Think back to just a few years before Westbrook broke the numbers (Basketball-Reference actually reworked its formula for box plus/minus after Westbrook shattered the single-season record in 2016-17) and remember that Oscar Robertson averaging a triple-double felt like one of sports' great unbreakable records. Westbrook made them sort of ho-hum (and helped pave the way for triple-double machines like Nikola Jokic and Luka Doncic).

By the end of his career, all of that production drove him up to 34th all-time in career MVP Shares and 30th in career wins over replacement player (when you combine the regular and postseason).

He's 14th all time in career points, 58th in rebounds and seventh in assists. The entire list of players who are in the top 60 of all three categories is: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, Kevin Garnett, LeBron James, Karl Malone and Russ.

He didn't always play like a traditional point guard, but he helped expand the position. He didn't always make the textbook "right play," but he always played with effort. He never won a championship, but he took the Thunder to the NBA Finals in his age-23 campaign, and his front office traded James Harden in the following offseason.

Westbrook's ultra-aggressive style wasn't for everyone. He was (and again, probably will be) a lightning rod for criticism.

But at some point in the future, fans and analysts will accept that he was, quite simply, one of the very best to ever play the game.