Granted he did himself no favors at all with his play, particularly in the first few months of the season; ceasing the diagnosis of what went wrong in Los Angeles last season by heaping all the blame on Russell Westbrook, at that point is both ham-handed and myopic. It is more nuanced than that because frankly last season Russell Westbrook was never put in a position to succeed. Taking things back to before he ever donned a Lakers gamer in an NBA game, anyone with basketball brain 1 could have seen that at best this would be a clunky fit and it became evident once he, Anthony Day-to-Davis and LeBron James shared the court. As the Lakers were the latest franchise to be seduced by but ultimately engulfed by the Lebron James system, meaning that Westbrook would be the latest LeBron teammate to have sacrifice all the things that made him great at the behest of playing with James. With no real offensive system to highlight what he does well and to mitigate his glaring deficiencies, Russell Westbrook was in a no-win situation, all but ensuring his failure while having an anever-ceasing helping of blame laid upon him, despite the what should have been easily discernable holes in the Lakers roster.
The Lakers, powered by the media arm of Klutch Sports, did nothing to quell the trade/bench/cut/buyout Westbrook rumors that persisted, even to this day. If all of that were not bad/insulting enough, the Lakers acquired Patrick Beverley, the person in the NBA he had exchanged the most public rancor over the past several years not named Kevin Durant. That is a clear indication how the Lakers view Westbrook. It would be fathomable for this franchise to bring in a player that either Lebron or Anthony Davis had a long and documented antagonistic history with? At no point in his Hall of Fame career, has Russell Westbrook’s carried a lower cache than it does currently does and the Lakers, as well as the media are of Klutch Sports continue to turn his name into one of the longest running jokes in recent league history and it is quite sad.
