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in 2019 i published a column in portuguese calling the triple-double the stupidest statistic in the sport. the argument was arithmetic and it was not difficult to make. ten is a line somebody drew. nine rebounds are worth what ten rebounds are worth, minus one rebound. i counted a hundred and seventy-two players averaging double figures in points that season and used the count as proof that ten points is not a landmark. moskowitz and wertheim had already published the underlying idea in scorecasting, which is that round numbers govern people for no reason anybody can defend.
then i went further. anthony davis finished that season with 25.9 points, 12.0 rebounds and 2.4 blocks and zero triple-doubles, and i wrote that he was the better player. the conclusion was that a triple-double is three random figures stacked and called an achievement, and that its value is nothing.
russell westbrook retired on wednesday. he announced it in a video he does not speak in, narrated by michael b. jordan, with a short caption. “you had to be there. and now it’s over,” westbrook wrote.
i have had that 2019 column open all day. it holds up on the number and comes apart on the man.
he finishes with two hundred and nine triple-doubles, more than anybody in the history of the league. forty-two of them arrived inside one season, in 2016-17, breaking a mark oscar robertson set in 1961-62 and held for fifty-five years. he averaged a triple-double across four separate seasons. robertson managed it once. nikola jokić has managed it once. westbrook did it four times and nobody else has done it twice.
none of that touches the arithmetic. those are still three lines somebody drew, and clearing them is still a question of where the lines happen to sit. a season averaging 9.8 rebounds is not a lesser season than one averaging 10.2, and anyone who says otherwise is telling a story about counting rather than about basketball.
the win-loss record is the part i could not have written around.
in the two hundred and nine games where he got there, his teams went 153-56. a winning percentage of .732, spread across eighteen years, seven franchises and several rosters with no business winning anything at all. a measurement worth nothing correlated with victory for two decades. either the correlation is an accident of who happened to be standing on the floor, or those three columns were registering something the arithmetic could not reach.
versatility is the word the broadcasts used. versatility is too polite. what the columns were registering was appetite.
getting to ten in points, rebounds and assists on the same night asks a guard to want the ball on every possession, and to want the miss on every possession he did not touch. westbrook stood six feet four. he retired as the career leader in rebounds from the point guard position, a badge he carried in public with some pride. he got there by walking into traffic with centres for eighteen seasons and coming out with the ball.
scott brooks watched him work out before the 2008 draft and had one thought, and it was about his own playing days. “there’s no way i can stay in front of this guy,” brooks said.
the seattle supersonics took him fourth out of ucla that june and moved to oklahoma city before he played a game for them. then he did not miss one. three hundred and ninety-four consecutive games from the start of 2008-09 through the end of 2012-13, which is five full seasons of a man arriving.
in portland in 2015 he took a knee to the face and broke a bone. i was calling that game on tv and could not believe what i was watching. there was a dent in his cheek. he missed two games. he came back five days later in a protective mask and put up forty-nine points, sixteen rebounds and ten assists.
kevin durant spent eight seasons in the locker beside him and once described the training schedule in a single line. “by time i would get to the gym, russ was already done in the morning,” durant said.
743 dunks between the regular season and the playoffs, second among guards in league history behind dwyane wade. a six-four man went at rim protection on purpose, at full speed, for eighteen years. the collisions were deliberate and they were repeated.
the same constitution produced five thousand and thirty-eight turnovers, second all time. twelve thousand five hundred and forty-three missed shots, seventh. a career three-point percentage of 30.8, accumulated across the exact eighteen years the league spent rebuilding itself around the shot he could not make.
the appetite travelled. between 2016-17 and 2020-21 he played three hundred and fifty-six games for three different franchises. he averaged 26.0 points, 10.3 rebounds and 10.1 assists across the whole of it. a hundred and forty-seven of the two hundred and nine came inside that stretch. the rosters changed, the coaches changed, the cities changed. the output did not move.
oklahoma city got the largest share. eleven seasons, and he leaves as the franchise leader in points, assists, rebounds and steals, which is a sweep that only happens when one man is present for everything. the roster he grew up inside had durant and james harden on it and reached the finals in 2012, where he scored forty-three in game four at twenty-three years old and lost in five. harden was traded that autumn. westbrook tore a meniscus in the first round in 2013. durant fractured a foot in 2015. in 2016 the whole thing ended in a game seven against a team that had won seventy-three, and durant signed with that team in july.
westbrook signed an extension into the vacancy.
what followed is the season everybody still argues about. 31.6 points, 10.7 rebounds, 10.4 assists, forty-seven wins with a roster missing the best scorer in basketball, and an mvp decided in one of the most contested votes of the century. the extension held the franchise together long enough to attract paul george and carmelo anthony. the trade that sent him to houston in 2019 returned the assets that became the 2025 champions. oklahoma city gives him a standing ovation every time he goes back, which is what cities do for the ones who stayed.
the hallway ran on the same appetite. he turned the walk into the arena into a runway and sewed some of the outfits himself. he kept the met gala pieces and the draft night suit. the whole league copied him, and shai gilgeous-alexander still does the walk in oklahoma city.
houston is where the second half of the career starts and where the shape of it becomes visible. the rockets sent clint capela to atlanta to give him a floor with nothing standing in the middle of it. the experiment ended in the orlando bubble. after that came washington, the lakers, the clippers, denver and sacramento. five of his last six stops lasted a single season. in all the years after durant he won one playoff series, with denver in 2025.
the criticism was correct, and the sentence deserves writing properly rather than as a concession. a six-four guard who needs the ball, cannot shoot from distance and rebounds like a power forward is a genuinely difficult object to place on a roster. the offence he wanted required a floor nobody builds any more, with a centre on the block and long rebounds coming off flat misses. every front office that declined to reorganise itself around him at thirty-four was making a sound basketball judgment, and several of them made that judgment twice.
the shooting was more complicated than the shorthand allows. he is one of thirty-three players in league history with a thousand career makes from sixteen to twenty-three feet, and he ranks eighth on that list at 37.8 percent. what he never became was the man who waits behind the line for a pass.
the request every team made was identical. be smaller. do less of it, more efficiently, in fewer minutes, off the ball.
appetite does not come in doses. a man who had been the most involved player on any floor he stood on since 2008 could not be metered down to fourteen quiet minutes without becoming somebody else. the somebody else would have been worth signing for about two seasons, and then the athleticism goes. what every team wanted was the version of him that had never existed. he retires fourth in career points among players who never won a title, behind karl malone, harden and anthony, which is a list of men who were each too much of one thing.
he and lebron james are the only two men who have finished with twenty-five thousand points and ten thousand assists. widen it to two thousand steals and the list still stops at three.
he was still producing at thirty-seven. sixty-four games for sacramento last season, fifty-eight of them starts, 15.2 points and 6.7 assists for a team that finished 22-60 and tied utah for the worst record in the west. sacramento talked to him about coming back in a reduced role behind a rookie point guard. washington made an approach. he stopped instead, at the last moment when stopping was still a decision he was making rather than one being made for him.
his agent released a statement on wednesday about the market for players in their late thirties. “teams won’t spend on older vets because of current cba rules,” jeff schwartz said. the lakers changed hands for 12.5 billion dollars in the same week.
the aprons did not invent the judgment that a thirty-seven-year-old guard shooting 30.8 percent from three is a luxury item. they removed the margin where a team could be wrong about that judgment and absorb the error. the veteran minimum used to be where a franchise kept a man for reasons it could not defend in a spreadsheet. a roster spot gets charged twice now, once in salary and once in the flexibility the second apron takes back. nine all-star selections, nine all-nba teams, two scoring titles, three assist titles, an olympic gold medal, a place on the seventy-fifth anniversary team. the market in august had a smaller job behind a rookie.
jokić needs eleven more triple-doubles to take the record and will almost certainly have them by march. he will reach the same number from the opposite direction, at walking pace, from the elbow, with his hands. the record will change owners and the argument about whether it means anything will change with it, because the man collecting it now is the least arguable player alive.
i still think the number is junk. the arithmetic of 2019 has not moved an inch, and ten rebounds is still a coincidence of base ten. what the column got wrong was assuming that a meaningless line says nothing about the man who keeps crossing it. lines drawn at random are the hardest kind to cross on purpose, because nothing in the game bends to help anybody reach them. he crossed them anyway, in a body four inches too short for most of it, for teams that mostly lost in may.
two hundred and nine of them. the last on the fifteenth of march, and three times that night he got to ten.
seventeen new paid subscribers since the last edition, and seventeen is not a round number: joanna, brian, mattias, priya, thomas, elena, dario, david, anthony, marcus, iris, ben, charles, yusuf, leonard, gil and anders.
they paid in the same week this newsletter spent a whole friday arguing that round numbers measure nothing at all. seventeen people deciding a basketball sermon should keep existing is a count that measures plenty.
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