Russell Westbrook, former high school coach says, wants to win title ‘to make it all worth it’

Long before the twists and turns and brushes with basketball mortality, before this journey pitted him face-to-face against his home, this Los Angeles story began with a few simple words to Reggie Morris: You should take a look at lil’ Russell.

Morris, in need of extra playoff bodies 20 years ago at Leuzinger High in Lawndale, Calif., extended an invite to a kid on his frosh-soph team. But lil’ Russell had little idea, until that day, that he’d be invited to practice with the varsity. And thus, a 5-foot-9 Russell Westbrook walked into Morris’s gym that winter, still wearing the white sneakers that he’d trekked the halls in that day, still in street clothes.

Westbrook practiced anyway. Leuzinger had some veteran talent, including future NBA wing Dorell Wright. They all wanted to put the tiny kid in the Air Force Ones in his place. Wanted to “punk him,” as Morris put it.

It never happened. Westbrook flew around in rebounding drills that day in near-cartoonish sneakers, burning with the kind of outsized fire few have rarely seen before or since.

“He made them take notice of who he was … he’s continued to do that,” said Morris, a longtime LA-area coach who’s remained tight with Westbrook, the director of his AAU travel team. “He’s never kind of, really, lost his identity in that way.”

For an incomparable two-decade professional life, Westbrook has remained that same kid who nobody at Leuzinger ever expected to reach the NBA, according to Morris. His identity, the size-14 chip on his shoulder molded within a working-class family in inner-city Los Angeles, has never changed. But the league has changed towards him, Westbrook repeatedly cast aside, and in the twilight of a polarizing Hall of Fame career.

Houston shipped him away in 2019 after one season. Washington sent him to Los Angeles a year later. Westbrook “jumped,” Morris recalled, at the chance to return home to play for the city that molded him. The move ended unceremoniously, with the Lakers and Clippers both cutting bait in the span of three years. A two-year prove-it deal in Denver soured after a promising start — a blown effort in a double-overtime loss to Minnesota largely placed on him and his role a central topic in the organizational chaos that led to Michael Malone and Calvin Booth’s firings.

Through it all, though, the Nuggets have stuck by him. Interim head coach David Adelman turned to Westbrook off the bench to close Game 1 against the Clippers, and he delivered a wild Pandora’s Box of clutch shots and bewildering moments that ended in a Nuggets win. He then hit three crucial 3s in a Game 2 loss.

“Russ is with us,” Adelman said. “He’s with us, now.”

The identity remains alive and well, an organization finally behind it, for better and for worse. And the road to perhaps his last best chance at a title — a goal that’s eluded him for 17 years — will take him back to Los Angeles for Games 3 and 4 of the Nuggets’ first-round series.

When asked by The Denver Post what a championship might mean to Westbrook, Morris didn’t hedge.

“With all that he’s endured — I think it would mean the world to him to win,” he said, “because the sacrifice would’ve been there just to get the major chip on the board.

“I think he definitely wants to win … to make it all worth it.”

Westbrook, for his part, has largely shrugged off the notion that returning to Los Angeles and playing the Clippers carries much of a motive. He was simply excited to get back home to family, he smiled the week before the playoffs, and take his kids to school.

But Adelman acknowledged last week that “everything’s emotional in this league.”

And the last few years, in Los Angeles, have been fraught with emotion. Westbrook headed to the Lakers back in 2021-22 with a solid relationship with LeBron James, the opportunity to don purple and gold a big deal for him, as Morris described.

That tenure ended in disaster, a visible struggle with decline, and fit in L.A.’s system devolving in front of his home city. Westbrook wanted to show he could be part of a championship culture, as Morris said. Instead, the Lakers went 33-49 his first year. He was called a “vampire” on national television.

“I know,” Morris said, “it didn’t necessarily sit well with him.”

After a brief rebirth with the Clippers, accepting a bench role last season, another Los Angeles franchise cut ties after a brutal first-round playoff series last season in which Westbrook shot 26% from the floor. He still has plenty of friends, Morris said, in the Clippers’ locker room. But the fiery guard has brought a visible dash of braggadocio through two games against Los Angeles — screaming in ecstasy after a game-winning forced turnover in Game 1, and appearing to bark repeatedly at the Clippers’ bench for leaving him alone in the corner in Game 2.

“I would imagine it carries a lot of weight for him, just knowing his personality,” Morris said. “Knowing that he was all in, and I think, he’s going to feel like he has something to prove — like he can contribute to a winning team.”

This Nuggets’ season has been chaos. And their ability to advance hinges, in part, on the man who has flitted around hardwood with chip-on-shoulder chaos since his first varsity practice in Los Angeles.

“His heart is as big as all outside,” Morris said of Westbrook. “And, that — he is playing to win. Like, that’s what he wants to do. And he does it to the best of his ability.

“Sometimes, it may come across a little different. But I think in his mind, he feels like nobody wants to win as much as he does.”

Want more Nuggets news? Sign up for the Nuggets Insider to get all our NBA analysis.