Russell Westbrook Season Review: Twice in a lifetime
Family Man:
OMG. Oh my gawrsh. Like, seriously, y’all, watch that video. I can’t even. Can you even? I can’t imagine that you can.
There’s so much Russell Westbrook slander on the interwebs right now. He’s a stat-padder, and he’s a ball hog, and the Thunder kept the worst of their three MVPs, and people get better when they leave him, and nobody even likes playing with him, and his clothes look funny. Know what the above montage says about all those things?
He don’t care, he don’t care.
It’s hard to watch the above video or look at the image below without reasoning that, at some point, basketball should seem less important to Mr. Westbrook, father of Noah, isn’t it?
“Oh, sure, I’ma put this little ball of buttery joy and dimples aside and go throw this leather basketball through a hoop for basically 9 months. See ya when I see ya, Nina.”
This is that little ball of buttery joy and dimples, for the record:
I’m gonna need a minute.
One more.
Just look at that little guy, could you even blame Russ for being less than focused this season? If he had, for instance, given less than 100 percent effort during a Playoff game, setting himself up for a long Los Angeles summer with that tiny, squishy angel, could anyone have blamed him? I’d go AWOL from my job just to hang out with that cherub for a day; don’t lie and say you wouldn’t.
Oh wait, that man’s effort still shone through your tv with the fire of a thousand suns? That’s odd, because it seemed like he should have become complacent.
For real, what man could shoulder the burden of being, by all accounts, a spectacular husband and first-time father, while simultaneously remaining in peak physical form and spreading an entire family’s-worth of emotion across the basketball court 86 times in eight months?
Oh, Russell Westbrook is that particular dude, isn’t he? Well fine, how badly can he really make us feel about ourselves, though? Sure, he combined his unparalleled success and passion, his glorious and beautiful home-life, and his remarkable and enviable athleticism into one grand, public spectacle, but it’s not like he was also an innovator in the shoe industry. That would just be too much. Far, far too much.