This season’s MVP race stands for everything

Russell Westbrook’s 51-point triple-double stands as a thing of history. It’s absolutely incredible that a guy can do that! But Game 2 wasn’t the story of Westbrook against James Harden. It was the latest chapter in Westbrook against the world.

While Westbrook led the Thunder against forces external and internal, Harden let his guys cook. On what was purportedly one of Harden’s worse shooting nights, Lou Williams and Eric Gordon kept the Rockets going. The Thunder couldn’t even survive seven minutes without Westbrook, and when his scoring chances fizzled out in the fourth quarter, so did the team.

And you already know that this is a referendum on the MVP race. Everything is.

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“I don’t give a f— about the line. We lost,” said Westbrook after the game. But to be clear here, we care about the line. We should be able to recognize that round numbers don’t necessarily mean the best or most important production; we should also be able to recognize that we’ve placed a value upon triple-doubles that transcends the production. This is overly reductive, but if the difference between Westbrook and Harden was only a few percentage points in points created to Harden’s favor, should that negate Westbrook’s stat line? Nah, man.

We do a disservice to the MVP to reduce it to only the granular, which isn’t to say that TRIPLE-DOUBLEZ are the only thing that matters. This is the MVP, and it bakes into history a season of success that teams will deconstruct and learn from for years to follow. To take a negative angle and discount the greatness —  especially in a race which, by any measure, is too close to call either way — is absurd. To keep it simple: everything matters.

What endears me to Harden’s case is that he’s maximized his team in a way that transcends the idea of five players playing as one in a system. The way the Rockets play is better understood as one player playing as five: every weapon in their offense is an extension of Harden’s ability to drive, see with and kick the ball. When Gordon or Patrick Beverley makes a 3-pointer? That’s Harden drawing two and kicking out. When Clint Capela completes an alley-oop? That’s Harden drawing two and throwing the lob. You know he can get his, but when the defense overloads, that’s when the Rockets come alive and all of the weapons are activated, sometimes in a chain of passes.

The four-out-and-rim-runner look isn’t unfamiliar, but Harden takes the formula to a new extreme. It’s a fantastical embrace of the Mike D’Antoni vision, even more devoted to system than the Steve Nash Suns. “You can have all these nice ideas, but it can’t be translated without [Harden],” D’Antoni told SB Nation’s Tim Cato.

All of this, as opposed to Westbrook being five players. He is a team unto himself, but in a different sense. The Thunder have a team full of specialists, most of them defensive — although Steven Adams and Enes Kanter are one of the best roll-men platoons in the league, they’re undermined by so-so shooters like Andre Roberson, Victor Oladipo, Taj Gibson and Jerami Grant. Through a sheer exertion of will, Westbrook forces himself to the rim anyway, and the Thunder achieve a hodgepodge two-way balance with heavy doses of Westbrook and raw defensive talent.

It’s not unfairly so, but the Thunder don’t really have a collective identity. (They lost Kevin Durant and Serge Ibaka last summer. What would you do?) What Westbrook has done exists within the absence of one, and just to begin with, that takes remarkable stamina. There’s really nothing negative to say about Westbrook’s individual success and what it has done for his team’s collective benefit. Even when he’s forcing the issue, who’s he to swing the rock to? Nobody else on that team is creating chances. There’s an argument that the idea of value can be reflected in that, where Westbrook’s ability to override the limitations of his teammates defines his importance to the Thunder. As a character trait, it’s what makes Westbrook so great: he does what he wants because he quantifiably can, to the tune of a triple-double average.

The corresponding argument would be that Harden’s teammates, who are probably better and definitely more tailor-fit to his game, exist within his orbit in a way that is every bit as special as Westbrook’s play on an individual basis. And for all of the things we can say about Harden, whether of his electric handle or his smooth intellect, it also says something about how hard it is to achieve what the Rockets have that it took them this long. They didn’t accomplish it with a second star in Dwight Howard, and this time last year, you couldn’t have imagined Gordon and Ryan Anderson in his place. The conventional wisdom is that it takes multiple stars to win, and Daryl Morey spent years collecting assets for a mega-trade. Undoing that thought has been its own process. Now Harden solely is making everyone else around him better. There’s value in that, too.

When Westbrook sits, the Thunder sink. In the regular season, their net rating plummeted from a margin of +3.3 points per 100 possessions with him to -8.9 without him. The Rockets have an easier time weathering minutes without Harden, dropping from +6.3 to +2.8, through which you could infer less dependency on Harden. But these are both one-star teams, and only one has turned their star into something greater. The Rockets have more weapons, more release valves, assembled for and around Harden who edges out Westbrook in assist points created as well as hockey assists. Maybe it’s only natural that they can plug Gordon and Williams in where Harden sits. This isn’t just a system — it’s an organism, and it’s within that context that Harden’s numbers stand out.

You could go the other way and say that Westbrook topped Harden’s usage and assist percentages, already absurd, by roughly seven percentage points each. The raw force of it remains impossible to overlook, the stat line itself a monument to physical possibility. The argument, then, maybe just comes down to cohesiveness versus comprehensiveness.

Different circumstances have led different players to different seasons that are nearly equal by any objective measure. Harden hasn’t done any less for his team just as Westbrook hasn’t made his any worse. Both have been incredible, which is why we’re not going to do them the disservice of acting like Kawhi Leonard or LeBron James have equal footing here (close, but not quite). There’s something simple and profound in the triple-double, and there’s also something simple and profound in the team concept. Now we have to decide which one we like more.

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Westbrook shot 4-of-18 in that fourth quarter of Game 2. When it’s all said and done, Harden and the Rockets will probably advance to the second round. History will remember both as equal participants in the league’s most competitive MVP race yet, but the way the league moves forward will be looked back at as a referendum on Harden versus Westbrook. Just like everything else.

The more I think about it, the more I think James Harden is the MVP.