With no games being played and Michael Jordan’s 10-part documentary dominating basketball discourse, we’ve all spent a considerable amount of time taking random strolls down memory lane.
To that end, ESPN.com did something quite ambitious.
On Monday, the worldwide leader published a collaborative piece featuring bytes from many of its most respected staffers. The goal? To identify the top 74 individual seasons in NBA history.
Such an endeavor is difficult if for no other reason than attempting the impossible task of making cross-generational comparisons among stars and, in this case, seasons.
The leader of the project, according to the piece, is Kevin Pelton, whose “championships added” formula attempts to quantify the greatness of an individual season by combining both regular-season and playoff accomplishments.
Understandably, a player winning a championship and/or a Finals MVP weighs heavily.
What’s most interesting, though, and something that was noted by Royce Young — a longtime and well-respected Oklahoma City-based ESPN reporter — is that Russell Westbrook appears nowhere on the list. The only mention of Westbrook occurs in the 29th entry, which features Kevin Durant.
It turns out that Durant’s 2013-14 season was ranked 29th, with Young contributing the following comment:
Before the 2013-14 season, Kevin “I’m tired of being second” Durant set the goal to win the MVP. With Russell Westbrook recovering from offseason knee surgery, Durant took hold of the opportunity. It featured the “Slim Reaper” era, a two-month offensive tear that crescendoed with Durant outplaying James in a showdown in Miami. Durant won his fourth scoring title, got his MVP and capped it with an all-time speech.
That season, Durant averaged 32 points and 7.4 rebounds per game in the regular season and followed it up with 29.6 points and 8.9 rebounds per game in the playoffs. Sadly for the Thunder, though, that 2014 season resulted in a loss to the eventual champion San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference Finals.
Aside from Durant (who had seasons rank 29th, 53rd, 55th and 57th), 11 of Westbrook’s other contemporaries had seasons that rank in the top 74.
From lowest rank to highest, below is the list of those whose careers overlapped with Westbrook and had an individual season make the cut:
11. Giannis Antetokounmpo (65th)
10. Kawhi Leonard (63rd)
09. James Harden (61st)
08. Derrick Rose (58th)
07. Dwyane Wade (56th)
06. Kobe Bryant (52nd, 64th, 73rd)
05. Dirk Nowitzki (43rd)
04. Kevin Garnett (32nd)
03. Stephen Curry (18th, 36th, 46th)
02. Tim Duncan (13th, 38th)
01. LeBron James (3rd, 8th, 9th, 23rd, 27th, 33rd, 34th, 45th)
Feel free to translate the findings as you wish, but at a minimum, it’s probably fair to conclude that ESPN’s brain trust concluded that Westbrook’s MVP season — he averaged 31.6 points, 10.7 rebounds and 10.4 assists per game — was somewhat hollow. That historical campaign was Westbrook’s 2016-17 season, which, in all fairness, ended in a five-game elimination in the first round of the playoffs.
Westbrook’s Thunder was ousted by James Harden’s Rockets. Coincidentally (and perhaps ironically), Harden finished second to Westbrook in MVP voting that season and would go on to win the award after the conclusion of the following season, 2017-18.
That 2017-18 season from Harden saw the Rockets capture a 3-2 series lead over the Warriors in the 2018 Western Conference Finals, but the Warriors managed to win the final two games of the series after Chris Paul suffered a hamstring injury in Game 5.
According to Pelton, the ranking takes postseason results into account, so it appears that the panel collectively concluded that Harden’s trip to the Western Conference Finals and his MVP Award, historically, is better than Westbrook’s triple-double average, MVP Award and first-round ouster.
Was Westbrook truly snubbed? Or is his historical 2016-17 season worth cracking the top 74? Should his making history and breaking Oscar Robertson’s single-season triple-double record weigh heavier than the fact that he couldn’t get the Thunder out of the first round?
We know how ESPN’s basketball experts feel.