Whew, it's a good thing Chris Webber's entire NBA career wasn't judged on a single bad college game.
That's not what I meant at all which I suspect you knew.
What I mean is that I think there's a reason that UCLA team that had Love, Collison, Westbrook, and Luc all at the same time, couldn't get by Memphis. Now we can argue D Rose was the best player on the court, at the time he was. And Calipari outcoached Howland in that game, he did.
But a large reason UCLA lost that game was Westbrook got too caught up in trying to outdo Rose.
He played 36 minutes and had 22 points and was 10-19 from the floor, 2-3 from 3. The boxscore I'm looking at says he had 3 turnovers, I'm fairly certain it was more but I'll take their word for it.
But he played 36 minutes with the ball in his hands quite a bit(even with Collison playing) and had TWO assists. It was a low scoring game(UCLA scored 63) but UCLA played 40 minutes in a game that was at times wide open, and had only 8 assists and a large part of that IMO was the way Westbrook played.
he's been brilliant this year in 2 games against the Warriors, they won them both easily and he was unguardable. But for much of his career, even before they lost Durant, he struggled against the Warriors, lots of shots, low %.
I pointed this out a few years ago when he and Durant had that famous interview where they poked fun at Curry's defense. That series, Curry held him to like 32% shooting when guarding him. Normally Klay guards him but for several years now the Warriors color guy, Jim Barnett has been pointing this out, and he loves Westbrook. But he says everytime we play them he plays with such a chip on his shoulder about Curry, that it often works to the detriment of his team.
I haven't seen it in a couple of years but the Warriors local station in the Bay Area used to show the number and his fG% and turnovers were not very good careerwise against the Warriors.
It's a catch 22 part of what makes him so great is he takes it personally, he hates his opponent. But it's also part of what keeps him from being better IMO. He wanted so badly to outplay Rose he hurt UCLA's ability to get the ball to Rose. He wants so badly to beat Curry, and now Durant, that he's had some absolutely horrible shooting games against them over the years.
But honestly the biggest reason I say the way he plays he won't win a title, is that to win a title you need 3 really good to great NBA players now. It's just not clear to me they're going to get that because those guys don't want to play with him. Part of why Durant left is he wanted to play on a team that passed the ball more, people can criticize him all they want I get it, but the fact is the Warriors passed the ball more than any NBA team when Durant was in OKC, and at least one year OKC had the fewest average passes per possession of any NBA team when Durant played with RW.
I just don't see it right now where 2 players good enough to pair with Westbrook, are going to want to play with Westbrook.
In a sense it's like when Vick was a starting NFL QB, he was a great player, but it limited how good of a passing team they'd have because really good WR's, don't want to play with Vick because he ran too much and didn't get the ball to receivers in stride etc.
Westbrook is an absolute beast, but I think he's going to have to change his game a bit to win a title.
This year he had the 2nd highest usage rate, in the mid 34's, last year his usage rate was nearly 42%! I know they had no talent last year but if that's not ball dominant I don't know what is.
