We Should Probably Be Making A Bigger Deal Of The Fact That Russell Westbrook Is On Pace To Have His Third Straight Triple Double Season
Does it feel weird to anyone else that when Westbrook won his MVP by averaging a triple double for a team 6 seeded 47 win OKC team it’s all we ever heard about? Well then he backed it up by averaging another triple double last year but Harden was given the MVP (which was deserving). While there wasn’t the same level of hype surrounding what Westbrook was doing, it was still talked about as we closed the season since he needed to do some work on the glass. But now, after backing both of those seasons up AGAIN, averaging another triple double through 30 games of the season (22 GP), I feel like we aren’t hearing shit about it and that makes no sense to me. Do you know how rare it is to average a triple double in three straight years? Nobody in the history of the NBA has done that. Oscar Robertson got close, but never actually did it for three straight years.
If you look, the Thunder are one of the better teams in the West, and yet Westbrook’s MVP odds are the 9th best in the league at 25/1. I know people say Westbrook just stat hogs but come on, how can you not call what he’s doing extremely impressive? I understand his efficiency is way down, but this is a guy that almost never misses time over the last three/four years and is doing something year in year out that we didn’t see happen once from 1961 to 2016. Having four straight seasons of over 10 assists is also impressive, that’s some shit we haven’t really seen since Nash had 4 straight in his MVP days. Nobody will ever catch John Stockton and his 10 straight years of 10+ assists, but for a player who has this selfish reputation, that’s a pretty interesting nugget.
If you ask a casual fan what the hottest storylines are in the NBA you’ll probably get
1. Anything with the Warriors
2. Where Anthony Davis is going to go
3. Anything LeBron
4. Kawhi in TOR
5. More LeBron shit
I don’t think anyone would talk about Westbrook’s three straight triple double seasons as a major storyline, almost as if it’s completely normal and something that happens all the time when in fact if he pulls it off we’ll probably never see a three year stretch like that again. Maybe this is just me and it’s not that weird to anyone else, I just remember how big of a deal this was when he did it for the first time, you would think that his continued run of triple doubles would garner more attention. Am I off base here? Don’t give me that shit that triple doubles aren’t impressive either, that they happen all the time. That’s just not true, not at this pace. He’s far from a perfect player, but I think when you are doing something that may never again be repeated in NBA history, that should get more love