Somewhere in a K-pop fan Discord I still lurk in years after I should have aged out, there’s a pattern that repeats every single time a member announces she’s leaving a group. For two years straight, replies under her fancams complain that she can’t sing, that she’s dead weight in the choreo, that the group would be tighter without her. The week she announces she’s out, the same accounts post multi-tweet threads about how she was always the heart of the group and nobody appreciated her enough.
I’ve been thinking about that Discord all week because Draymond Green just described the exact same mechanism happening to Russell Westbrook, minus the choreography. On his own podcast around August 13, Green said basketball fans suck, himself included, and he meant something specific: the same people who spent a decade calling Westbrook “Westbrick” were, the moment he announced his retirement, suddenly posting about how he never got the respect he deserved. Green’s right. I just don’t think it’s hypocrisy in the way everyone’s using the word. I think retirement is the only event that gives fans permission to feel what they actually felt about a guy the entire time.
Green said on his show that for the last eight to ten years, all Westbrook heard from the discourse was how bad he sucked, how he couldn’t shoot, how he stat-padded, how he wrecked good teams by joining them. Then, this week, Westbrook retired after 18 seasons via a video called “The Museum of Unspoken Answers,” narrated, for reasons nobody has adequately explained to me, by Michael B. Jordan. Within hours, the reaction flooded in from the exact league that had spent a decade rolling its eyes at him — LeBron James, Donovan Mitchell, Trae Young, guys who’d actually played against him and knew what he was.
The version Green quoted directly is the one that stings. “‘Westbrick’ and all the things y’all said about him,” he said, mimicking the flip. “And the moment he step aside, ‘Oh man, y’all did Russ wrong. Can’t tell me he couldn’t be on a team… Gonna miss him and not in the NBA.’” Call it the Westbrick-to-tribute pipeline: spend ten years building the nickname, then retire it in a weekend.
Timelines did their own version of the same thing. Here’s one that made the rounds:
https://twitter.com/LegionHoops/status/2087963675462180941
Multiply that by however many accounts have posted some flavor of “we didn’t deserve Russ” since Tuesday, and you get Green’s whole complaint, distilled: a guy shouldn’t have to leave before people will say the nice thing out loud.
The easy defense here is that this is just how retirement tributes always work, for anybody, in any sport. Career appreciation happens at the end because that’s the first moment the career is whole — you can finally see the shape of it, all 18 seasons, the 209 triple-doubles nobody else in NBA history has sniffed, the 2016-17 season where he averaged a triple-double and won MVP and became the first player to pull that off since Oscar Robertson in 1962. That’s not a small career to eulogize. Almost everyone gets a gentler send-off than whatever was being said about them in year eleven.
But that explanation doesn’t actually cover the Westbrook case, because the criticism was never framed as “he’s aging out.” It was framed as “he sucks,” presented as a permanent, current-tense fact, right up until the Kings and Wizards offered him nothing but minimum contracts this summer and he decided that was the finish line. The takes didn’t mellow with time into appreciation. They reversed overnight, the moment he stopped being a variable anyone had to account for on a Tuesday.
That’s the part Green’s quote gestures at without quite naming, which is why retirement makes praise free in a way an active season never does. Criticizing a player who’s still on a roster costs you something, because he might make you look wrong next week. Westbrook could always answer a “he stat-pads” take with an actual triple-double, and did, for most of two decades. Praising a retired player costs nothing, because there’s no Thursday box score left to check your work against. You can call him the heart of the league now, risk-free. The fans didn’t learn anything new about Westbrook this week. They found out that saying something nice about him had finally gotten cheap.
I don’t know if that’s better or worse than plain hypocrisy, and I’m genuinely unsure which answer I’d want. Hypocrisy at least implies people knew they were being unfair and said the mean thing anyway. This feels more like a market correction — the price of an opinion about Russell Westbrook dropped to zero the moment he could no longer move it, and the same people who spent a decade shorting him bought back in at the bottom. Green called that ugly on a podcast and moved on. I’m not sure it’s avoidable, honestly, and that’s a strange thing to sit with about a guy who’s spent his whole career on the other side of the discourse around athletes and fandom that Green, of all people, usually stokes rather than critiques. I’ll believe the next round of “misunderstood legend” talk about somebody who’s still active the day I see fans say it about a player who can still prove them wrong. For the rest of our NBA coverage, you know where to find us.
