Lightning Report: The OKC Thunder couldn’t adapt and the Blazers ate them

Russell Westbrook

It’s easy to bash Russ for the way he played on offense for most of the series right now. Like, really easy. Rather than do that, however, I want to take a minute to focus on his defense where he became borderline unplayable at times.

As he did last year and as he’s probably done since he came out of the womb, he took his matchup with Lillard way too personally and it ended up hurting him way more than it helped. The best example is the three that Lillard hit in game one that Westbrook just let him have even though Dame is one of the best shooters from that spot in the league:

If this were any other player, we could write it off as a mental blip and move on with our lives, but Russ has a history of this stuff. More than once in last year’s playoffs he tried to get into it with Ricky Rubio only to have Rubio score with relative ease on him. In both situations, he stopped playing smart, reasonable defense and started taking way too many risks in an effort to get in somebody’s head (??). It never worked, and it actually played a big role in each team winning the series.

These kinds of things were ok – and kind of endearing – when he was a 22-year-old point guard who was still one of the most athletic guys in the league, but at 30, it’s not nearly as fun. He makes the same dumb decisions, takes the same bad shots, takes the same bad gambles on defense as he did back then.

The only difference now is that he doesn’t have the athleticism to make up for it. His game was never built to adapt to a reality where he wouldn’t be able to dunk on anybody in his path and now we’re seeing what it looks like when he can’t.