The NBA All-Stars rosters didn’t have many misses but Russell Westbrook taking a spot from Devin Booker was a huge one.
What made Russell Westbrook the 2017 NBA MVP is the same thing that will make him an All-Star in 2020. His reputation for the spectacular. An attraction to hard-nosedness on the part of fans, media and Westbrook’s own competitors. Especially when compared with the All-Star candidacy of someone like Devin Booker, the lazy over-valuation of the stuff that makes our animal brains get worked up is clear. We still haven’t figured out how to consume Westbrook, and rather than confront some of these biases, NBA coaches decided, eh, I’ll just go ahead and check the box of the guy whose name and game I know better.
There is almost no way to build a case for Westbrook over not only Booker but several snubbed stars. Though he plays for a 29-18 Rockets squad, it’s not unfair to posit that Houston has under-achieved. The team is outscored by 1.6 points per 100 possessions when Westbrook is on the floor. Despite being brought in to better complement James Harden on and off the floor, the Rockets are plus-5.4 per 100 possessions with Harden and no Westbrook. That number is worse when both share the floor and even worse with Westbrook and no Harden.
Individually, this is also one of Westbrook’s worst seasons. Aside from the on/off numbers painting him as not very impactful, all-encompassing advanced metrics such as Box Plus-Minus show Westbrook to be merely average this season. Though he has bought into playing off Harden just as he did with Paul George in Oklahoma City last season, his game has failed to adapt to co-stardom. All this is to say that rewarding Westbrook simply due to track record and team success is ridiculous. He has underperformed relative to his track record and is not a major reason for his team’s success.
Booker, on the other hand, continues to be one of the biggest drivers of the Suns’ improvement and has yet again made big strides toward being one of the 10 or so best scorers in the world. Despite taking fewer 3s, Booker is at an incredible 63.4 true shooting percentage, more than 10 percentage points higher than that of Westbrook, another player whose entire purpose on the court is play-making on offense. They are both poor defensive players, but for whatever it’s worth, Booker has been better this season than ever before, especially on-ball.
Rather than look into that, or reward the Suns for finally making progress, coaches voted in the guy whose name they’d heard most often over the years. If they’re not going to take this stuff seriously, than honestly, cancel the event. At this point it’s just a charity exhibition in which the participants could get hurt. Fans, players and coaches have at least one brain fart on the voting every year. If the media is the body taking something most seriously, it’s time to rethink its value.
At a certain point with this stuff, reconsidering what it’s for is genuinely helpful. The sarcasm is a result of frustration here, but if the purpose of this is not to reward a player who’s put in work to become one of the best in the game and is making his team dramatically better, who knows what it is. The NBA shouldn’t go quite as egalitarian as the MLB and try to give every team a representative at All-Star weekend, but it’s just ludicrous that something as simple as asking coaches to basically list the seven guys who show up most in their gameplans over the course of a season is too hard for them.
Coaches watch and absorb more NBA basketball than just about any human beings alive. They should be more aware of when a player like Westbrook takes a step back than anyone. Yet rather than stir things up at all or give even a sliver of credence to the possibility that they care about some things more than winning, coaches put guys like Westbrook into this game year after year.
Of course, yelling about this type of head-to-head candidacy is also part of what the All-Star game is for. Booker very well could make it as an injury replacement for Westbrook himself, who has dealt with hand injuries all season as well as knee injuries over the course of his career and has been put onto a load management schedule by Houston. Booker’s time is bound to come eventually. The game may well be more entertaining if Westbrook is part of it. Who knows.
But this is a thing the NBA tells us we are supposed to care about, and seeing Westbrook be named over a deserving and much-predicted All-Star like Booker makes it really hard to care about. It’s a big mistake, but no one should be surprised. Westbrook has benefited from all this before and will continue to.