Is it really the end this time? For Russell Westbook, Sunday’s Game 7 decider between the Thunder and the Nuggets was a homecoming in more senses than one: not only was he returning to the city to which he’d given his best years, a court on which he’d embodied more than any other player in the franchise’s brief history the thunder of Oklahoma City’s name, he was also a man in search of a place to call his own – a role, an identity – after years of peripatetic wandering across the NBA in which teams have often seemed unsure how best to exploit the 2017 MVP’s prodigious, if fading, gifts.
After near-misses with Oklahoma City in the 2012, 2014 and 2016 playoffs, the litany of injuries that followed, and the long search for a basketball home in the years since – which have seen him play both an ill-fitting support position in the LeBron James-Anthony Davis Los Angeles Lakers and a starring hand for the cross-town Clippers that did little to hide metastasizing deficiencies in his game – the move to Denver last summer seemed to offer hope for a reset: occupying a clear sixth man role, Westbrook was brought in to supply experience and energy off the bench for those crucial minutes when Nikola Jokić and Jamal Murray needed a rest.
