tsherkin wrote:sp6r=underrated wrote:The best description I heard for Westbrook is that his skill-set and body type gave him the aging curve of an NFL Running Back. The way he plays the game makes being effective in the 30s extremely hard unless he completely revamp his game which he hasn't figure out how to do. Wade was a similar type and he fell off a cliff in his 30s too.
Wade fell off due to injury more than anything else. He never played 80 games a season in his career to begin with, and averaged 68 games per season, then 63 over the remainder of his career. He was almost never healthy because he too lacked reliable game beyond 10 feet. Or I should "scoring ability beyond 10 feet," because obviously he was savvy with pick-and-rolls.
But not adapting to ageing doesn't make them headcases.
100%. Westbrook isn't causing disruption by being a crazy bastard, just by not possessing game enough to back up his contract or role. There were a couple years where his relative inefficiency wasn't SO bad. League average TS% has risen enough to change that, but his scoring efficiency has actually worsened in the absolute, not just relatively, and his turnover rate has risen back to where it was early in his career as well. In 4 of the past 5 seasons, his scoring efficiency has been worse than it has since his first two seasons. Not as bad, because he was a sub-50% TS dude the first couple years, but worse than his customary 53% or so. That's ROUGH, particularly now.
He's incompetent from 3, and indeed unreliable past 16 feet (and really, past 10). He's become a sub-70% FT shooter, no less, wasting even more opportunities. He's really just degraded into a caricature at this stage. It's sad, too, because he still has bounce and quickness, he's just... He was never a particularly cerebral player to begin with but he's not quite as overwhelming, not as relentlessly athletic as he used to be and he has not actually seemed to improve any aspect of his game since coming into the league as far as scoring repertoire, which is a challenge for him as he ages and his athleticism erodes, if only somewhat.
Westbrook certainly knows how to spam assists. And he's still capable of doing that, as we've seen. 3 assist titles in 5 years didn't happen JUST from insane usage and it certainly isn't happening from bulk MP, because he's been a fairly well-managed 34-ish MPG player.
