Dwyane Wade Believes This Former Star Guard is Underappreciated

Russell Westbrook has one of the weirder careers of any NBA superstar. He was the most beloved player in franchise history for the Oklahoma City Thunder, but since then, his career has taken some weird turns. In OKC, Russ was the hero. He stuck around even when Kevin Durant decided to leave. He won an MVP award, became a triple-double averaging machine, and climbed the list for all-time scoring, assists, and rebounds. 

Then, Russ left OKC and started to bounce around the league. The next two years he kept putting up impressive numbers with the Rockets and Wizards. Since then he’s seen his numbers slowly decline as he hasn’t been able to find a permanent role on any of his new teams. 

Dwyane Wade spoke about Russ and how he thinks he is underappreciated. 

“Russ is having one of the most underappreciated careers that we will see. In his own right just one of the GOAT careers. No one has a career like Westbrook and no one plays the game like Westbrook. He is a 1 of 1. Congrats to Russ on that. You can’t tell Russ that he’s not the best.”

Wade is right that Westbrook is a one of one. We haven’t seen many guys with the same explosive athleticism and effort as Westbrook. We also haven’t seen many guys go from one of the most beloved guys in a franchise’s history to almost out of the league in just a few years. 

We probably won’t totally appreciate Westbrook until he is gone. However, knowing his competitive fire and love for the game of basketball, he will likely be around for a few years yet.