Russell Westbrook offers a new challenge for LeBron and the Lakers

Russell Westbrook may raise the floor for the Los Angeles Lakers. He may also raise the level of difficulty, significantly, for LeBron James.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of building around LeBron James is how many essential team-building steps he spares whatever franchise employs him. Need an indomitable scorer who can attack the rim and get reliably to his spots on the floor? He fits the bill. How about a seasoned floor general who reads the game in real-time and sets up efficient looks for teammates? James is one of the best in NBA history. A switchable defender who can guard multiple positions, or a smart help defender to shore up the backline? Check and check.

James makes it so easy to construct a coherent and competitive roster, so long as his team can find a few capable shooters, passable rim protection and a modicum of secondary playmaking. And yet for the past three seasons (with a few notable exceptions), the Lakers have insisted upon subverting those gifts by shooting their best player in the foot with ill-fitting teammates, strapping weights around him as if to further prove his greatness by increasing the degree of difficulty.

James, as the most powerful voice in the organization, isn’t blameless either, having presumably signed off on, if not conceived of, the front office’s worst decisions. Perhaps the greatest offensive playmaker in league history has repeatedly expressed a desire for more creators around him in lieu of shooting and defense.

LeBron James has never had a teammate like Russell Westbrook on the Lakers

Russell Westbrook, a high-volume playmaker who provides neither shooting nor defense, follows the trend. The logic behind L.A.’s acquisition of the nine-time All-Star last week may seem simple enough: get another highly productive offensive creator to augment the team’s offensive firepower and take some of the burden off of James and Anthony Davis during the regular season; after all, how could a team with three 20-point-per-game scorers ever want for offense? In practice, however, the logistics of incorporating Westbrook into a team with two established All-Stars could be much more complicated.

The ideal secondary or tertiary option around James shoots well enough to keep a defense honest, attacks seams in secondary actions and either defends on the perimeter or protects the rim. Westbrook not only checks none of those boxes, he actively duplicates everything James already does, only less precisely and less efficiently. The trigger-happy point guard posted a higher usage rate than either of his new star teammates last season, yet on this team, there is no justification for him wielding greater authority over the offense than James and Davis. He’s at his best in spread pick-and-roll, turning the corner and getting downhill with shooting around him, but the exact same and more can be said of James. Westbrook could theoretically operate as a roll man when James handles the ball, but he’s joining a team that already features the best roll man in the league.

Those redundancies could be mitigated, at least in part, if Westbrook were a better off-ball player, but that area of the game happens to be his biggest deficiency. Concerns that “there’s only one ball” are often exaggerated reactions born of shock over the magnitude of newly-assembled star power. But in this case, the aphorism rings worryingly true. Westbrook’s refusal to play anything less than a star role was difficult to justify when he played beside Kevin Durant and James Harden, and would frankly be indefensible as LeBron James’ teammate. Yet even if he were willing to accept a lower rank on the team, it’s unclear how that would work.

These Lakers aren’t the Nets, for whom all three of Kevin Durant, James Harden and Kyrie Irving shoot well enough to always afford one of the three stars ample room to work; or Houston in 2018, when Harden and Chris Paul’s scoring versatility and the shooting around them gave defenses no obvious place to help; or the Warriors at the end of last decade when Steph Curry’s movement and gravity could break a defense without him even touching the ball while Durant worked as an on-ball assassin. Westbrook happens to be one of the worst high-volume jump shooters in NBA history, which reduces his off-ball value to almost zero.

It is Westbrook’s nature to commandeer his team’s offense — to “will” his team to overcome some of the very challenges he, himself, creates. There may be value in that approach for middling teams with first-round playoff aspirations, but on the kind of team the Lakers hope to be next season, it can create serious hurdles. This is the fundamental challenge of Westbrook’s game; a team with a historically inefficient offensive focal point can only rise to a certain level of mediocrity, and a superior team will almost always have preferable alternatives.

Because he doesn’t threaten defenses even slightly without the ball in his hands, playing Westbrook alongside better on-ball creators requires either taking the ball out of a better player’s hands or functionally playing four-on-five when Westbrook doesn’t have the ball. That makes it difficult, if not impossible, for his game to scale around other ball-dominant players; Westbrook can effectively only operate as a lone wolf at this point in his career because any attempt to mesh with a star necessarily mitigates either his own value or that of his teammates.

These concerns may matter less in the regular season when James and Davis can find points within the flow of the offense if Westbrook insists upon dominating the ball. There is merit to bringing in a second primary playmaker to alleviate some of the offensive mantle from James’ soon-to-be 37-year-old shoulders. The Lakers have struggled to score with James off the floor for his entire L.A. tenure, and allowing him to take more possessions off during the regular season should keep him fresh for the postseason. A heavy stagger in the rotation that keeps one of James and Westbrook on the floor at all times could bring more offensive balance to a roster that, beyond its three stars (that term is used generously here to include Westbrook), has strikingly little offensive verve.

But teams don’t acquire $41.4-million players (especially one of Westbrook’s stature in the league) to serve as backup point guards and the time that James and Westbrook share the court will present challenges that even Dennis Schroder didn’t create. In addition to his offensive limitations, Westbrook hasn’t shown interest in adhering to a defensive scheme in years, which, combined with his waning athleticism and high minute totals have made him into one of the most damaging guard defenders in the NBA. Furthermore, his gargantuan salary now makes it exceedingly difficult for the Lakers to acquire players who do fit with James and Davis beyond ring-chasing veterans on minimum contracts.

Frank Vogel and his staff will likely find ways around the woeful spacing constraints Westbrook imposes, but is it worth bending over backward to accommodate the player with the worst true shooting percentage among high-usage NBA players last season if it means putting James and Davis in suboptimal situations? The Lakers have long operated under the theory that, no matter how flawed the roster around him, James will be good enough for them to overcome any hurdle. That premise is about to come under more weight than ever before.