Suns Outlast Valiant but Shorthanded Clippers, Advance to Second Round Showdown Versus Nuggets
Devin Booker scored a game-high 47 points on 19-27 field goal shooting while also passing for a game-high 10 assists and grabbing eight rebounds to lead the Phoenix Suns to a 136-130 victory versus the L.A. Clippers. Kevin Durant added 31 points, six rebounds, and four assists, while Deandre Ayton had 21 points plus a game-high 11 rebounds. The Suns won this first round series 4-1, and will face the Denver
Nuggets--who eliminated the Minnesota Timberwolves, 4-1--in the second
round. I will provide in depth analysis of the both the Nuggets and the Suns in my series preview article, so the remainder of this article will focus on the Clippers.
The Clippers were without the services of injured stars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, two players who load managed their way through the regular season to preserve themselves for the playoffs only to be unavailable when it mattered the most. L.A. Clippers Coach Tyronn Lue offered this succinct comment during his postgame press conference: "Take the two best players off any team in the league and see if they can win in the playoffs."
Norman Powell led the Clippers with 27 points. Mason Plumlee added 20 points off of the bench, and he tied Ivica Zubac for team-high honors with 10 rebounds. Russell Westbrook paced the Clippers with eight assists and he snared eight rebounds, but he scored just 14 points on 3-18 field goal shooting.
It is difficult to beat a team featuring a trio scoring 99 points on 38-64 field goal shooting (.594), but the shorthanded Clippers never gave up despite trailing by as many as 20 points in the fourth quarter. The Clippers outscored the Suns 36-18 in a little over eight minutes to cut the lead to 130-128 with 2:46 remaining in the contest. The Clippers had several opportunities to tie the score or take the lead, but they just could not get over the hump.
Westbrook was the only Clippers' starter who played all 12 fourth quarter minutes, contributing four assists while committing one turnover; he scored two points on 1-4 field goal shooting, but his energy and passing fueled the comeback. It is easy to nitpick his shooting percentage and his shot selection--and there is no doubt that many commentators will spend a lot of time doing that--but if you watched this game, this series, and this season with understanding then you know that Westbrook is still an excellent player who can make a significant contribution to a winning program. After the game, Coach Lue praised Westbrook for saving the Clippers' season and enabling them to make this playoff run. Paul George has publicly stated that he wants the Clippers to bring Westbrook back next season.
It is not contradictory or illogical to state that the Clippers would have benefited from Westbrook shooting a better field goal percentage while also acknowledging that without Westbrook's other contributions the Clippers would not have been competitive at all in this game, let alone in this series.
Long-time readers who are familiar with my critiques of James Harden's annual playoff collapses may wonder how Westbrook's poor shooting in an elimination game is different than James Harden's playoff "concert tour" shooting percentages. That is easy--Harden's playoff choking is about more than just missing shots (although he misses plenty of shots); he also often plays in a disinterested, detached, and unenergetic manner, which is the exact opposite of how Westbrook plays. There is a big difference between missing shots while playing hard versus missing shots while going through the motions.
Again, it is fair to say that Westbrook should be expected to shoot a better percentage than he did in game five, but Westbrook's shooting must be placed in the overall context of his performance during this series--including the fact that, as Coach Lue stated, the Clippers had no realistic chance to prevail with both of their top two players out of the lineup.
Not too long ago, the L.A. Lakers and their media sycophants tried very hard to destroy Westbrook's reputation and end his career. It is great that he escaped from the Lakers and proved that he can still play at a high level.
Labels: Chris Paul, Deandre Ayton, Devin Booker, Kevin Durant, L.A. Clippers, load management, Norman Powell, Phoenix Suns, Russell Westbrook
posted by David Friedman @ 2:33 AM
17 Comments:
how do explain the nosedive in RW's FT% over the last 5 years (4 of which are mid-60%s, after he was 80%+ for most of his career) ?
--J
J:
It is very puzzling.
One thing that I read or heard is that when the NBA changed the rules regarding stepping away from the free throw line several years ago that this altered Westbrook's free throw routine, and that this may have affected him. Athletes are often creatures of habit/routine, so it is possible that this affected Westbrook.
J:
Here is a brief article referencing the rules change: https://basketballforever.com/2019/01/03/the-nba-rule-change-which-ruined-russell-westbrooks-free-throw-shooting
The problem with your articles with Westbrook relative to players you like to denigrate is that no matter what Westbrook does, you'll find a way to put it in a good light. This article is a prime example. Westbrook undoubtedly played a bad game 5, that's the bottomline. He's still a decent player, but no longer an AS caliber player obviously. The Lakers were a terrible team with him and in 12th place. His coach didn't even think he should start. In his years without Durant, he's only made the 2nd round once and missed the playoffs altogether 2x. That's 8 seasons of work with 5 different teams. It's not working with him. The Lakers now look like a top 3-4 team in the league. Their defense is now dominating the Grizzlies.
You're quick to make an excuse now for his FT shooting. Who seriously needs to walk back 20 feet between FTs? Sounds like he can still walk about 7-8 feet, too. This should not be difficult to overcome. Is he walking about a mile every time between FTs in practice, too? That'd take forever just to shoot 10 FTs. He hasn't made the adjustments necessary and/or it's a mental thing. Though his shooting has always been erratic from everywhere on court. Not sure what the first year was for this rule; 2016-17 or 2017-18 season. He dropped dramatically in 2018, but then dropped dramatically again in 2019. So, that doesn't make sense after more time. But, then increased 10% in 2020, before dropping to his basically 66% over the past 3 seasons. So, something is definitely wrong with his shooting.
Lue definitely gets his players to play hard. Amazing job in game 5 on the road without George/Leonard and Westbrook stinking it up. But, if George/Leonard are actually load managing during the season instead of sitting because they're actually hurt, then that's on Lue. The Clippers need to trade both, at least Leonard. They're useless if they can't play in the playoffs.
Anonymous:
Cite a specific example of something that I wrote about Westbrook that is demonstrably false.
Cite a specific example of something that I wrote about a player who I "like to denigrate" that is demonstrably false.
I am not talking about picking who would win a series. No one gets those picks 100% right. I am talking about commentary/skill set evaluation, or broader predictions (such as Player X will never win a title as the number one option because of A,B,C).
I am not making excuses about Westbrook's free throw shooting. J asked a question, and I provided what I know. I also said that the decline is puzzling.
Ham is a rookie coach who, so far, has not won even one playoff series, so we do not have much evidence regarding how sound his player rotation decisions are. Lue is a championship-winning coach who immediately made Westbrook his starter.
I have written extensively about Westbrook's playoff career, so I am not going to rehash everything here in the comments sections. I will just note that your take is very selective, and leaves out important context.
If Westbrook was so awful in game five, why did Lue leave him in the game for every fourth quarter minute?
Don't give us a throwaway line about Ham's lineup choices but then ignore that a championship coach handled Westbrook completely differently in the very same season.
Different Anonymous here, but I think it's fair to suggest that the needs of the Lakers and Clippers rosters are different and what Westbrook provides is more valuable to one than the other.
The Lakers have Lebron James; they do not need a primary ballhandler, which is Westbrook's most valuable skill. Given how stationary Lebron tends to be these days, they do benefit quite a lot from cutting, shooting, and defense, three things Westbrook does not consistently provide.
The Clippers were badly in need of a primary ballhandler, particularly after George/Leonard went out. They also have considerably more shooters and defenders than the Lakers, and can more easily absorb Westbrook's obvious deficiencies in those areas.
It was probably the right call for the Lakers to bench Westbrook, and it was probably the right call for the Clippers to use him. He is not the worthless bum his detractors make him out to be but he's also not a true rising-tide-lifts-all-boats star, either. He is an idiosyncratic player with unusually dramatic strengths and weaknesses that will suit some rosters better than others.
Anonymous:
Your take is more objective than most, and you make some valid points.
However, I think that more should be made of the fact that LeBron--who supposedly makes everybody better and is the most unselfish, "pass first" player ever--in fact is not always so great as a teammate. The Lakers should have used Westbrook as the point guard pushing the pace, but at this stage of his career LeBron does not want to run (unless he has the ball, particularly before he broke Kareem's record). The Lakers made little effort to maximize what Westbrook does well, and then they blamed him for many things that were not his fault.
I disagree that Westbrook is as idiosyncratic as you suggest. At his peak, he was a reliable 30-10-10 player. What team would not benefit from that? Westbrook was great as a second option alongside Durant, and those teams were very successful. He led OKC to the playoffs when they had a player who was such a non-shooter (Roberson) that opposing teams chased him around the court to intentionally foul him when games were close. He lifted Paul George to MVP level when they were teammates. He played well alongside Harden in Houston. He helped carry the Wizards to the playoffs (and look at the Wizards since they got rid of Westbrook).
The Clippers have nothing but praise for Westbrook during his stint with the team. He plays well and he plays hard.
From the standpoint of historical greatness, Westbrook is not LeBron, Durant, Giannis, or Curry, but there are not many other players from the past decade or so who I would take over him (healthy Kawhi is one, but healthy Kawhi is a unicorn; mostly, we see unhealthy Kawhi).
(Same Different Anonymous)
I would agree that he was a better fit in Washington, OKC, and Houston, to varying extremes, than he was in LA. Perhaps less so in Houston, where he made for an awkward fit with the Harden/Capela combo for many of the same reasons he was an awkward fit with Lebron/AD, namely that if someone else is already handling the ball most of the time and there is a large body lingering in the paint then there is not a ton for him to do, resulting in Capela being traded.
I would add to your list of players from the last decade that should be taken over Westbrook at least Jokic, Butler, and Tatum. I would consider adding Embiid under the same caveat that you would consider adding Kawhi, namely that if he were ever healthy he would probably be more valuable but he is never really healthy long enough to prove it. The same could be said of AD.
Luka seems to be more or less be "Westbrook, but efficient" so perhaps him as well though his youth means he has less of a proven resume up to this point. I would say that Jaylen Brown appears to be at least comparably valuable as a second-banana to Westbrook in the same role, but we have not seen him yet as the alpha dog so it is difficult to guess how he'd fare in that role.
There are perhaps another five or ten or so about whom an argument could be made, but the outcome of those arguments likely comes down more to subjective preference about what "matters" than those of the of the players previously mentioned, which I think for the most part are fairly cut and dry (though I imagine even there we will disagree on some of them).
Anonymous:
Nobody is a great fit with Harden when Harden and the coaching staff believe/insist that Harden is a championship-quality number one option. We have a decade of evidence about that. The theory currently being tested is whether Harden can be the second or third option on a championship team.
To be clear, when comparing Westbrook to other great players I meant his body of work, not his current level. I would obviously take Jokic and Tatum over Westbrook now. If Jokic and Tatum sustain what they are doing then at some point I would take their body of work over Westbrook. I love Butler but he has yet to prove that he can be an MVP-caliber player for an entire season year after year. Luka's resume is too thin. That is why I said that the time frame under consideration is the past decade or so.
We agree about AD and Embiid.
I'm not taking peak Brown over peak Westbrook, nor am I taking Brown's body of work over Westbrook's (that is not even close).
There is a ceiling for where I would rank Westbrook based on him being 6-3, which I have mentioned about other players as well. Jerry West is the only player under 6-5 in my Pantheon.
Is it fair to ask Westbrook to be the best guy in a playoff series at some point in his career if we're going to venerate him like this? Is that too much to ask for a Top 50 guy?
He was a great sidekick to Kevin Durant, but in seven years post-KD he's won nine total playoff games across five teams. The only series he won he missed more than half of.
Triple doubles are lovely, but at some point isn't it reasonable to expect the "best guard since Kobe Bryant" to win a little without a Top 25 all-time teammate? Is it really too much to expect him to squeak past the occasional Gobert or Lillard?
He's shot 39% in the playoffs since the KD breakup. At this point that's a pretty healthy sample size, a stretch that covers fully half his career. Everybody has a bad shooting series here or there, but his are starting to outnumber his good ones. Across 22 career series he's got 10 under 40% now and another 5 under 42%. At some point is it fair to expect an MVP to make a few shots when it counts?
You say Butler hasn't proven he can be an MVP. I agree. But he has proven he can be the best guy on a Finals team, and he has proven that it wasn't a one year blip, either. He was a shot away from doing it again last year and he just knocked off your (and my) title pick on their own floor without his third leading scorer. Is that less valuable than impressing the media members you so often decry enough to win an MVP?
He's got playoff series wins against Giannis (three times!), Embiid, and Tatum, and if Goran Dragic's foot didn't explode in 2020 (or if Lebron didn't get a three month recharge nap) he might have one against Lebron, too.
His playoff FG% is 47% (50% in Miami), but even when he does have an off night he's a demon on defense and gets some of it back on the other end. He doesn't have Russ' playoff-exploitable limitations as a defender or shooter, and he's much less turnover prone as his team's crunchtime closer.
I just can't really see the case for "great regular season numbers, always lose in the first round" over "still pretty good regular season numbers, consistently drags his teams kicking and screaming past where their talent should let them get." What am I missing?
Another Guy:
There is a reason that I am not on Twitter: I don't do hot takes.
Westbrook and Butler have combined to appear in over 40 playoff series, and I have written about most if not all of those series. Even if I just wrote 2000 words about each series, that would add up to over 80,000 words--a book, in other words.
So, I am not going to recapitulate all of that in depth analysis here in the comment section.
The answer to your question "What am I missing?" can be found be reading my series recaps and my skill set analyses of both players over the years.
In general, though, what you are missing is that you are artificially segmenting Westbrook's playoff career to fit your argument. In other words, you are cherry picking. Also, you throw in things like "Butler was a shot away from going to the Finals again" and "If Goran Dragic's foot didn't explode" and "if LeBron didn't get a three month recharge nap." Are you also going to include when Westbrook's teams were a shot, play, or key injury away from advancing? Being a shot away means that you lost. My analysis focuses on what happened, not what might or could have happened.
In this thread, I talked in general about how I would rank players from the past decade or so--not who is the best player in 2023 or since 2020 or after Durant left Oklahoma City. Essentially, after Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan were no longer in the conversation and after LeBron James started winning titles, who have the best players been? That means looking at the whole period.
You are correct that Westbrook's FG% is the weakest part of his game. It is one reason (size being the other) that I don't have him in the Pantheon or ahead of LeBron, Durant, Giannis, and Curry (who is proving to be somewhat of an exception regarding size) in the past decade or so.
Butler's entire playoff career (2012-2023) consists of nine series wins, 11 series losses, two Conference Finals appearances, one Finals appearance, with overall playoff averages of 20.9 ppg, 6.1 rpg, 4.4 apg.
Westbrook's entire playoff career (2010-2023) consists of 11 series wins, 11 series losses, four Conference Finals appearances, one Finals appearance, with overall playoff averages of 24.5 ppg, 7.2 rpg, 7.9 apg.
Because Westbrook does not take the regular season off (as Butler seems to do at times), the statistical gap between Westbrook and Butler is wider in the regular season (22.4 ppg, 7.3 rpg, 8.4 apg for Westbrook; 18.2 ppg, 5.3 rpg, 4.2 apg for Butler).
Westbrook has one regular season MVP and four top five MVP finishes total. Westbrook has nine All-NBA selections, including two First Team nods.
Butler has no top five MVP finishes and he has never made the All-NBA First Team or Second Team. He has four Third Team selections. He has made the All-Defensive Team five times.
I don't always agree with the media's award selections but in this example I think that the honors received paint the correct broad picture of the relative all-time statuses of the two players.
Unless you believe that sustaining high performance over an 82 game season does not matter (which, sadly, is the direction in which the NBA is heading), then Westbrook's regular season numbers and honors are an important part of this analysis.
If any of Westbrook's post-KD teams were one shot or injury away from a likely Finals appearance I am happy to amend that to his case. The one example that might be credible there would be this season, but then if Kawhi did not get hurt then Westbrook would not be the best player on the team anyway, and my question is mostly about the idea of them as their respective team's "guy." Either would obviously have better results playing alongside Peak Kawhi (or KD) than without.
I don't really think it's artificial to compare their runs as "the guy" versus giving Westbrook full credit for his seasons with KD in the context of my initial question. I am not questioning Westbrook's sidekick bonafides...but I also wouldn't take, say, Pau Gasol or Kyrie Irving over Butler, either. Butler has played, at most, one total season with an MVP candidate (in 2019) during his prime (he may have been a bench warmer during Rose's MVP year, I don't recall). It is probably reasonable to suggest that if given seven years of Kevin Durant he would have won a few more playoff series.
I'm not sure I buy that Butler "takes the regular season off," though I will grant he is not as sturdy as Westbrook (probably his most underrated "skill") and tends to miss 15-20 games a year due to injury.
Nonetheless, his team's winning percentages over the timeframe I mentioned: .500, .573, .622, .601, .556, .646, .537. Westbrook's are .573, .585, .598, .611, .472, .402, and .493. The three lowest finishes are all Westbrook teams, and the two highest are Butler teams, so it seems fair to suggest those injury absences aren't killing his teams' ability to contend.
If we are buying that the All-NBA is a good snapshot of who's good, then during that same stretch, Westbrook had 2 1st Team teammates, 1 2nd Team teammate, and 3 3rd team teammates, while Butler had 1 2nd team teammate and 1 3rd team teammate. If we prefer to just look at names on paper Westbrook played with Lebron James, Anthony Davis, Paul George, James Harden, and Bradley Beal while Butler played with Joel Embiid, Karl Anthony Towns, Bam Adebayo, Andrew Wiggins, and Kyle Lowry.
Westbrook wins the counting race for All-NBA selections no doubt, but at the same time guard is a much thinner position for All-NBA purposes. Westbrook's main competition is Curry, Luka, Harden, Lillard, Paul, and Young while Butler's is Lebron, Giannis, AD, KD, Kawhi, and Tatum. You may notice six of the best seven or eight of those players are forwards. It is a comparison that structurally favors Westbrook.
If we are going to use the MVP voting as our metric, it makes Harden better than either, but I don't think either of us believe that's the case, so I am hesitant to agree that it means much more than that Westbrook has very impressive counting stats and that voters may place less value on the things Butler does well (namely defense and cultural tone-setting).
You are correct that Westbrook has more CF appearances than Butler, but my initial query was about Westbrook as "the guy." I would agree that Westbrook + Durant is certainly better than Butler, but I don't see much evidence that a team with Westbrook as its best guy is nearly as competitive as a team with Butler as its best guy.
We can quibble about who had the "better" supporting cast year to year I'm sure (and Butler certainly wins that race in at least 2019), but it's hardly like Butler's been spoiled on that front. The team he just beat Giannis with is essentially Bam Adebayo and a G-League team. The team he made the Finals with started Duncan Robinson and Jae Crowder. Last year's ECF team had no one but Butler scoring over 15 PPG. He has demonstrated a consistent ability to elevate the sort of teams we used to make excuses for Westbrook not winning with.
Another Guy:
As I mentioned in my previous reply, there is a decade's worth of context to examine here. Each playoff series involved different circumstances (not just teammates, but also the opposition's talent level/injuries/matchups, etc.).
I love Jimmy Butler. If you scour this site, I doubt you will find much (if anything) negative about him, but a whole lot of positive about him. I do not want to give the impression that I am denigrating or diminishing him in any way. I'd rather have him than Embiid, even though Embiid is bigger and more talented; Butler has the right mentality, particularly in the playoffs.
I just don't rank Butler's career, up to this point, as better than Westbrook's career.
The shifting anti-Westbrook narratives are fascinating. We hear that he supposedly can't win as a number one option--devoid of any context about the situations when he was the number one option--and we hear that he is supposedly hard to play with, but then we also hear that he should not get any credit for team success when he was the number 2 (more like 1A and 1B) option to Durant. There is always some reason or excuse given to discount Westbrook's numbers and the success of his teams (four WCFs plus one NBA Finals as an All-Star/All-NBA caliber player puts him in rare air in the last decade or so).
If you go back and look at OKC's playoff runs with Durant and Westbrook, Westbrook was very productive and at times he was the best player on the court, though of course Durant was the best player overall. Those numbers and accomplishments "count" and they are part of Westbrook's resume.
Harden is a weird case. The "stat gurus" pumped him up and a lot of "stat gurus" became voting media members. He should not have won an MVP or received as many All-NBA selections as he did. Harden is an All-Star caliber player whose reputation has been inflated to undeserved Top 75 status.
In general, though, players who accumulate top five MVP finishes and multiple All-NBA selections are top 5-10 players. The media did not completely ignore Kobe in the mid-2000s--they just put him in the top five in MVP voting instead of him winning the multiple MVPs that he should have won.
Westbrook had multiple seasons in which he was one of the top five players in the NBA. Butler has not done that, and no amount of cherry-picked examples alters the basic reality of their careers.
Man, I'm sorry, but I just can't get there.
We can't have it both ways with the MVP voters. Harden got more votes than he should have because of crazy stats. On that we agree. Westbrook's entire MVP case was built on his stats; in fact he's the least winning MVP in decades. If the complaint is "MVP voters over-value arbitrary stats" then Westbrook's definitely under that microscope.
The ideal basketball player is a Top 5 guy in the regular season and the playoffs. Neither Westbrook nor Butler is that. If forced to choose, I'm going to take the one who's a Top 20 regular season player and a Top 5 playoff player over the one who's a Top 5 regular season player and a Top 20 playoff player every time. The goal of the regular season is to get to the playoffs; Butler's teams get there as often or more often than Westbrook's.
And I just think we have to draw a distinction between being the best guy and being the second best guy. That simply has to matter. Otherwise, where does it end? Is Klay Thompson better than both? After all, he's the second best guy on 4 Finals teams and the third best guy on two more, and unlike our candidates he also has four rings (and misses no opportunity to tell us so, but that's another story).
But even if we want to give Russ "full credit" for the KD years, I'd still rather have Butler. Both guys have made and lost one Finals.
Westbrook averaged 26/6/7 on 43% shooting in his (against a defense more interested in KD), Butler averaged 26/8/10 on 55%.
In the Conference Finals, Westbrook's career average is 24/6/8 on 39% shooting. Butler averages 23/7/4 on 47%.
Allowing that both guys are going to get me into the playoffs anyway, why would I take the one who gets worse in the deeper rounds over the guy who gets better? And that's before factoring in that one guy is an All-Defense level defender and the other is a poor one.
Also, using your own rules, Westbrook has won fewer playoff series in the last ten years than Butler has, even with Durant. Five of his eleven series wins are outside of that range, including the Finals run. In the ten year range that started this conversation, they've made the same number of Conference Finals, and Butler has made one more Finals.
Seems like Westbrook's only real argument is statistical or media-based. We know both things lie, and they especially lie about guys like Jimmy Butler who have massive non-box score impacts.
Even if you want to say I'm undervaluing the regular season, Butler's been the best player on a one seed; Westbrook hasn't. In the last ten years, even with the benefit of Durant on Westbrook's side for 30% of those years, Jimmy's teams have had better records in '15, '19, '21, and '22. They had the same number of wins in '20 (but MIA had one more loss due to weird COVID schedule) and this year Butler had more wins than LAL and the same number as LAC, but Butler's team went 35-29 when he played vs. Westbrook's going 36-37... we can banter about who "wins" '20 and '23 if you like, but at the very least it's close, and both years Butler outlasted Westbrook in the playoffs.
So I come back to not seeing this massive regular seasons disparity, unless you trust the media voters enough to balance out Butler's edge in both playoff record and individual performance... but I personally don't.
Another Guy:
My analysis is not based on the MVP voters. Again, I have written tens of thousands of words about both players. I am not going to attempt to convert in depth analysis into a Twitter-sized hot take, nor am I going to be persuaded by cherry picked examples, because I am looking at the whole body of work. Butler being worse than Westbrook in the regular season matters, because worse teams get lower seeding and tougher playoff matchups. At the end of the day, Westbrook has been a major contributor on teams that went farther in the playoffs than Butler (four CFs to one, with one Finals appearance each). You can hypothesize about what might have happened if Butler had different teammates or if Westbrook had different teammates, but I am talking about what actually happened.
Also, when you mention how often Butler's teams made the playoffs but attempt to discount Westbrook's playoff appearances with Durant are you including Butler's playoff appearance with the Bulls in 2014 when he was the team's fifth leading scorer? Or the 2013 playoff appearance when Butler was the team's seventh leading scorer?
You act like Butler has been the number one option/Superman carrying teams to the playoffs by himself for a decade. He made the Finals during the weird Bubble year and he rode to the playoffs on other players' coattails in several seasons.
Again, I don't want to sound like I am knocking the guy--but you are comparing a Top 50, first ballot Hall of Famer (Westbrook) unfavorably with a player whose resume just does not stack up.
Westbrook was an MVP caliber player in multiple seasons. I would say that even if the MVP voters did not. Butler has never been an MVP caliber player during the regular season. Harden is an outlier case where voters are attempting to justify the value of certain specific statistics, and a particular view of the game. Incidentally, the things that Butler and Westbrook do well are not things that "stat gurus" tend to count or appreciate.
Westbrook was an All-NBA caliber player for four WCF teams/one NBA Finalist. If he had been the 12th man on those teams, then those appearances would not "count" in this discussion, but he was at worst the second best player on those teams.
Each team and each season had its own context, which I explored in depth at those times, and I am not going to rehash all of that here. Both players have a substantial body of work, and Westbrook has accomplished more than Butler overall at this point.
In the ten year window under discussion, Butler was his team's leading scorer in eight seasons, its second leading scorer in one season, and in the 2015 season he was the team's fifth leading scorer (on a technicality, as two of the players above him played a combined 33 games and probably should not count).
He was also his team's best perimeter defender all ten years.
I don't think he road anyone's coattails in that span; he scored slightly less than the Bulls' two leading scorers who played 20+ games (Carlos Boozer and DJ Augustin) in '14, but was a better player than either. I would stop shy of calling him that team's best player given how exemplary a defender Joakim Noah was that season, but Butler was no worse than second.
He made the playoffs 9 of those years, made the semi-finals 5 times, the Conference Finals twice, and the Finals once, with a total playoff record of 7-8 in playoff series, and 49-41 (.544 winning percentage) in playoff games. Butler was cleanly the best player on eight of those ten teams, and arguably the best player the rest, though Noah and Embiid have strong cases.
In the same span, Westbrook was his team's leading scorer 3 times, its second-leading scorer 5 times, and third & fourth leading scorer once apiece. He has never been his team's best perimeter defender, and has probably never been its second best, either.
It is fair to note for Westbrook's case that he is a stronger regular season passer and rebounder than Butler, though those margins slim considerably in the playoffs.
He made the playoffs eight times to Butler's nine, the second round three times to Butler's five, and the Conference Finals twice. He has a record of 5-8 in those series and 29-41 (.414 winning percentage) in playoff games (all five of his series wins coming with an MVP-winning teammate beside him). He was clearly and obviously the best player on two of those teams, clearly not the best player on two more, and arguably the best player on a further three, though the MVP voters preferred Paul George and James Harden some of those years. For the most recent year, he was the team's third best player when everyone was healthy, second best player for the first two games of the playoffs, and best player for the remaining three, so I don't know quite how to "count" that one.
It is difficult to look at those numbers and conclude that Westbrook has accomplished more in the last ten years (though I agree with you that his case gets stronger if we count the three year prior, during which Westbrook was quite good and Butler was a bench warmer).
Westbrook has accomplished considerably more in terms of All-NBA selections, MVP votes, and counting stats. Butler has accomplished considerably more in terms of playoff and series wins, with nearly 60% more games won over the span we are discussing. I suppose it's a bit of the old Russell vs. Wilt argument, in the end. I was always a Russell guy, personally.
Your observation that every team and season has its own unique context is well taken, but I would suggest that those contexts reflect better on Butler than they do on Westbrook. Westbrook has played with more All-NBA, All-Defensive, All-Star, and MVP teammates than Butler (give or take a few post-injury Rose seasons), and his losses have generally come against weaker competition:
Westbrook lost to 2 Champs, 3 Finalists, and 4 Conference Finalists (Phoenix may raise some of those, but I doubt it). Half of his losses came against teams that could only beat him.
Butler lost to 3 Champs, 5 Finalists, and 7 Conference Finalists (at least one of those numbers is guaranteed to go up, unless the Heat win the title, which would help Butler's case even more). Only one of his losses came against a team that could only beat him.
Anywho, it seems we're destined to stay at loggerheads on this, but I appreciate you taking the time to discuss it.
Another Guy:
In this thread, I said "the past decade or so." I did not say exactly 10 years, and if you insist on doing a direct career-long comparison of Butler and Westbrook it makes no sense to arbitrarily leave out part of Westbrook's career. I was making a broad statement about who the best players of that time frame have been.
As I have repeatedly said, you are selectively citing facts in hot take manner. I have already summarized Westbrook's career numbers in the regular season and playoffs compared to Butler's, as well as their overall playoff records. The total numbers obviously do not favor your position, so you prefer to select which series to discuss. I have already discussed many of those series in depth, so for a breakdown of the full context of those series feel free to search this site.
I would just add that Westbrook has won two scoring titles and three assist titles while ranking in the top 10 in rebounding four times. He averaged a triple double for three straight seasons and for four seasons out of five, and those were not 10-10-10 triple doubles, either. Over the course of his career, Westbrook has done more things at a very high level than Butler.
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