The Whiteboard: Russell Westbrook is king of the negative triple-double

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Russell Westbrook and his triple-doubles are back in the news. This week he became the Washington Wizards’ all-time franchise leader in triple-doubles even though it’s just his first year with the team. And he did it with a historically unique stat line that only Oscar Robertson and Magic Johnson had ever managed before. He now has a triple-double in seven of his last eight games and is on pace to average a triple-double for the fourth season in his career.

But it’s not all rosy. Sometimes the full-bore pursuit of winning produces collateral damage and negative consequences, like the negative triple-double.

Going back to the 1977-78 season (the earliest season for which full game logs are available), there have been 202 games where a player recorded double-digit turnovers. Of those 202 double-digit turnover performances, 83 also saw the player miss at least 10 field goals. Of those 83 performances, 22 also came in a game that the player’s team lost by double-digits. And there we have the negative triple-double — turn the ball over at least 10 times, miss at least 10 shots, lose by at least 10 points.

And the king of the negative triple-double? Also Russell Westbrook.

He’s the only player in NBA history to have accomplished the feat more than once, and he’s done it three times. Incredibly, they all came within a span of four weeks during the 2016-17 season with the Oklahoma City Thunder — Jan. 13 against the Timberwolves, Jan. 18 against the Warriors and Feb. 11, again against the Warriors.

It kind of makes sense that Westbrook would show up here — he’s a paragon of historic usage and he’s tied with James Harden for the most double-digit turnover games in NBA history with 11 (no one else has more than six). And the 22 games that qualified were, for the most part, logged by NBA greats — Allen Iverson, George Gervin, James Harden, Karl Malone, Kobe Bryant, Steph Curry and Pete Maravich all appear. You need to have the ball in your hands a lot to turn it over at least 10 times and miss 10 shots and only the best players will get that opportunity, particularly in a game their team is losing when they’re trying to make up a big deficit.

And Westbrook isn’t alone at the extreme end of any one category. He missed 16 shots in one of his games, the most in the sample, but Maravich did in his lone appearance as well. Iverson, Damon Stoudamire, Gilbert Arenas and Sleepy Floyd all had 12 turnovers in their games, Westbrook never topped 11. Gervin and Maravich also lost by greater margins than any of Westbrook’s three games and World B. Free is pacing the field, having done it in a 34-point loss to the Milwaukee Bucks.

But somehow, Westbrook is the only one who managed to do it more than once. He’s an absolute, no-question Hall-of-Famer and one of the greatest players in NBA history. But in a career defined primarily by volume, there are some not-so-pretty records that come too.

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