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Message: [QUOTE="champs99and04, post: 2685102, member: 488"] The idea that you can't both be selfish and average a lot of assists should have been put to bed by Rondo years ago. But I think any take on Westbrook that ends up being too far to one extreme or the other is wrong. Yes, there are questions about how good he is defensively (which is where he does a lot of his stat padding). The fact that he shoots under 30% from three is also impossible to overlook from a guard in today's NBA. We have seen his teams wilter in the half-court on offense (and this was even when he was playing with Durant) late in games against dialed-in playoff defenses too many times. There is some 'Melo to his game - he puts up his numbers, and all things considered, he does so efficiently, but at what cost? You have to cater your offense to him more than you do with other great players. That's why Durant left. I feel for him, though, because he's really been a victim of circumstance far more than people will admit, not just because he's the lone holdover from the original core, but also because people forget how bad OKC's injury luck was post-Harden. There were numerous occasions pre-Kerr/Warriors when it felt like the Thunder were going to storm through the West. 2013 - I think this was the year Russ tore his ACL in one of the first playoff games - is your prime example, but even in 2014, when the Spurs were probably better, Ibaka went down at the worst time, and then 2015 was basically a lost season because of how banged up they were. When they were healthy, Durant shared a lot of the blame. His deficiencies as a ball-handler made it difficult for him to navigate tight spaces against smaller guys in crunch-time, leaving Westbrook to do a lot of the heavy-lifting and unfairly be billed as selfish because of it. The fact that a 73 win Warrior team, that was thoroughly outplayed for most of that series and aided by a historically great shooting performance from Klay Thompson in a game six I'm still shocked they won, clipped them in seven should not detract from his greatness in the mind of any reasonable person (the fact that Steph outplayed him games 5-7 can, but then you'd have to give him the benefit of the doubt for all the other occasions, like last year, where he played really well and lost). The fact that he, Durant, and Harden were all at one point on the same team and under 25 is hard to fathom. The fact that so many things needed to go wrong even [I]after [/I]they traded Harden for them to get to where they are now is even more staggering. Regardless, the lesson here should be that there is a major difference between being a losing player and being an imperfect player. Whatever imperfections he has are not fatal like they have been with so many other great players. He's a winner and he's a champion, and that's coming from somebody who is far from his biggest fan. [/QUOTE]

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