The Bradley Beal-Russell Westbrook fit examined

Wednesday evening, the Washington Wizards shocked the NBA world by trading face of the franchise John Wall for former MVP Russell Westbrook. Wall hasn’t played an NBA game since December 26, 2018, but was seeming fully healthy. His return to the NBA will be in a Houston Rockets uniform. Westbrook joins his third team in three years. The Wizards should be excited about that.

First things first: Russ is ball-dominant. Always has been. Bradley Beal was 5th in the NBA in usage last season on a bare Wizards team, and Russ was 6th despite playing alongside James Harden, who was 2nd.

Russ is going to take the ball out of Beal’s hands way more than Wall would have. About the only edge Wall had on Russ was ability to play point guard first, and a slight advantage (still poor) in jump shooting. They are similar facilitators, but Wall is purer as a point guard.

Still, Westbrook’s most successful season in the four since Kevin Durant left has been alongside Paul George in 2018-19. Westbrook assumed a secondary scoring role and became the orchestrator of the offense instead of the offense itself. George finished 3rd in MVP, putting up 28/8/4 on blistering 44/39/84 shooting. He led the NBA in steals to boot, and averaged just 2.7 turnovers. For Russ, that was the most assists, least turnovers, and least field goal attempts he’s averaged post-KD. That team was really good: 4th in defensive rating, 6th in pace but 1st in field goal attempts, 1st in offensive rebounding and 1st in steals. That was not all Russ and PG, but we’ll get to that in a second.

Beal is the most similar Russ will have to that type of fit. Beal is more similar to George than Harden was, and is more similar to George than he is Harden on offense. He is used to being the second fiddle, playing alongside John Wall his entire career. He should not be the second fiddle. He has earned this team. It is his team. He is at least as good as Russell Westbrook today. Westbrook’s success in DC will be contingent on him buying in and understanding his fit alongside Beal. It needs to be the way that he played with PG in that ‘19 season.

Steven Adams on that Thunder team was the first player in NBA history to average 5+ offensive rebounds without averaging 10+ total rebounds. Russ put up 11 boards to go with George’s 8, mostly all defensive. Westbrook’s rebounding, I cannot stress enough, is not about stat padding. When your lead ball handler gets the ball off the opposing miss, he doesn’t need to wait for a big to dish it to him. Instead, that would-be rebounder becomes a fourth man already dashing up the floor while Russ starts the break, putting additional and immediate pressure on the defense. This is why Westbrook teams are always so high in pace.

Westbrook is a scoring champion, an assists champion, and maybe the best point guard finisher ever. You want him running your break. He will find open guys shooting. He will pressure the defense to collapse around the rim, and then exploit the helping defender by hitting his man once he’s open. Beal is an ELITE cutter, and runs around screens in his sleep. This was exactly what Paul George was able to do in that ‘19 season to get open, efficient looks. There is nothing on offense that Paul George can do that Bradley Beal can’t.

That year in Oklahoma City gave us a taste of what Russ optimized looks like. He didn’t take a backseat to Paul George - more like sitting shotgun. But he knew Paul George was the way for them to score and win games.

He needs to do the same thing in Washington. This is Bradley Beal’s team. He needs to accept that he will not win by volume of stats, and will win by letting Beal do his thing. That will serve himself, too, to not be the focal point defenses key on non-stop. Beal has no holes in his offensive game. The cutting, the shooting from deep, the shot creation, the handling, the passing, the finishing at the rim. And he fits next to Westbrook, which is a hard thing to do. James Harden is better than Beal and he couldn’t do it. BUT (huge, Kardashian but here) Beal fits better next to beta dog Russ. No one fits next to RussBall, do-it-all extraordinaire. And RussBall doesn’t work in the playoffs.

Still, RussBall isn’t without value. He is the ultimate regular season game winner. That's valuable. In the first year without Durant in OKC, Russ won MVP on 30-point triple-double averages. He dragged a nameless supporting cast to 6th in the tougher Western Conference. That was a floor-raising that we haven’t seen since LeBron’s first stint with the Cavaliers. Seriously. They had no business being any good, and Russ just said “Watch.” Magic every night. He is not that good anymore, but that is the kind of thing he’ll bring the Wizards for 82 games (72 this year). The Wizards make the playoffs because of this trade. And that is far from nothing.

The Wizards will not be that Oklahoma City team. They can’t play that type of defense and they can’t rebound like that. But they will play even faster and score even more to make up for it. Davis Bertans will be the best shooter and floor-stretcher Russ has ever played with. Yes, I know Russ’ most famous teammate. Beal I already outlined: better fit than Harden was, while dropping oh so steeply from the best scorer alive to merely top 5. Rui Hachimura is a supplementary scorer that the Thunder team did not have (29 minutes of young Dennis Schroder put up 15.5 for that team’s third option). Thomas Bryant can do infinitely more on offense than Steven Adams, most importantly space for Russ drives. And then throw in Ish Smith, Troy Brown, Jr., Deni Avdija, and Jerome Robinson’s offensive games. That’s a lot of plus passing for a team that was 5th in pace before the bubble, and led the Association in offensive rating the first 2+ months of the season.

The Wizards were 9th in the East before the league shutdown in March. Now, they add Russell Westbrook (along with Deni Avdija) while losing nothing. This team - that has stated everyday they want to win immediately - will be in the playoffs. That’s something not small to be excited about.