NY Times:
The Misunderstood Genius of Russell Westbrook
In Philadelphia, before the first game of the N.B.A. season, Russell Westbrook worked through his warm-up routine. He was loose and laughing but — as always — precise. Westbrook’s internal clock had driven him to be the first player out on the court, a full three hours before tipoff, and he was performing his routine in front of a largely empty arena. He started with chip-ins and free throws, easy stuff to get his body going, and then moved on to his signature shot: the pull-up jumper. Westbrook’s pull-up is one of modern basketball’s most recognizable weapons — if not yet quite on the level of Kareem’s skyhook or Jordan’s turnaround or Dirk’s one-legged fadeaway, then at least at the edge of that territory. The move is a surprise attack. Westbrook is unreasonably fast and aggressive, a flying, screaming whirlwind of ferocious highlight dunks, and he charges the hoop with so much raging menace that defenders have no choice but to scramble backward to try to stop him. That’s when he hits them with the pull-up: He stops instantly and — while the defender’s momentum continues to drag him backward — leaps perfectly straight into the air, like a fighter pilot ejecting from his cockpit to escape an explosion, except that Russell Westbrook is the explosion: He is the explosion and the control all at once. The whole thing seems to defy the laws of motion. Growing up in Los Angeles, Westbrook practiced this move so many tens of thousands of times on the playground that he and his father referred to it as “the cotton shot,” because they always expected it to go through the net.
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. His pull up is actually one of the worse and least effective shots THATS CONSTANTLY TAKEN in NBA history. shyt is trash B.
