Welcome back to the NBA Star Power Index -- a weekly gauge of the players who are most controlling the buzz around the league. Reminder: Inclusion on this list isn't necessarily a good thing. It simply means that you're capturing the NBA world's attention. Also, this is not a ranking. The players listed are in no particular order as it pertains to the buzz they're generating. This column will run every week through the end of the regular season.
Westbrook went nuts Tuesday night to the tune of 20 points, 20 rebounds and 21 assists in a victory over the Lakers. The only other player in NBA history to put up a 20-20-20 line is Wilt Chamberlain in 1968, per Elias Sports Bureau. Westbrook shouted "That's for Nipsey!" a clearly emotional Westbrook exclaimed as the game drew to a close, a reference to his friend and fellow Los Angeles native Nipsey Hussle, a revered rapper and philanthropist/entrepreneur who was shot and killed this week. Hussle's death hit the NBA hard as a whole. We've seen tributes all over. We've seen the video of Kevin Durant informing Stephen Curry of the tragedy, and Curry's hands-on-the-head reaction is as raw as it gets.
For Westbrook to put up a 20-20-20 line is incredible. For him to set out to do it, and then actually do it, is beyond words. Just in terms of pure basketball, without even getting into the emotional stuff, that is so unbelievably hard to do. "It's just epic," Thunder teammate Paul George said of Westbrook's performance afterward. "Man, just the heart of that guy over there." Westbrook is on track to average -- AVERAGE!! -- a triple-double for the third straight season. There are many layers to this statistical boom, but on some level, it is simply extraordinary. That's really all there is to say about it.
Once again, Damian Lillard is getting hardly a breath of NBA talk. Once again, it's ridiculous. While other players get credit for big one-year leaps their teams take, Lillard's teams can't make big leaps because they're always operating, relative to the roster, at pretty much maximum output ... thanks to Lillard, who has this Blazers team, which outside of Lillard is a slightly above average team, in the hunt for a top-four seed year in and year out in the same Western Conference that just sent LeBron James into the lottery.
Remember when everyone thought the Blazers were done when Jusuf Nurkic went down for the season with that gruesome leg fracture? Yeah, not so much. Portland has won seven of their last eight, three of four since Nurkic went down, and with two games left against Denver, which Portland only trails by two games, the Blazers have a viable path to the No. 2 seed. That is remarkable. Lillard hasn't had his best games statistically of late, and the schedule has been soft, but stop looking for ways around just conceding to what should be very obvious at this point: Few players in the league impact winning more than Damian Lillard.
Curry has made five or more 3-pointers in nine consecutive games, the longest such streak of his career. Over that span, he is shooting 49.5 percent from three. He had been struggling for a nine-game stretch before that, just 33 percent from deep. What changed? Well, according to Marcus Thompson of the Athletic, who put out a fantastic piece on Tuesday, Curry -- are you ready for this? -- got his vision corrected. From Thompson:
"I started wearing contacts," Curry said late Tuesday, pulling his white "Ten in the Town" hat down on his head, creating an awning for his beaming eyes. "No, I'm serious."
For all of his career, his life even, Curry has had issues with his eyes. He said he has a condition called Keratoconus, known in the ophthalmology field as KC. Technically, it's an eye disease in which the cornea, normally a circle, progressively thins and takes on a cone shape. This distortion has given Curry what is known as an astigmatism, which is a type of error in the way the light bends when entering the eye. It doesn't distribute the light equally to the retina and leads to blurred or distorted vision. It's a genetic condition Curry was probably born with, though scientists don't know how it is acquired.
Wait a second. Curry — who traveled all the way across the country to the Bay, his Bible in tow — was blind the whole time? And now he can see?
"It's exactly that," Curry said when asked if he feels like he has new eyes. "It's like the whole world has opened up."
People! The greatest shooter in NBA history has been shooting with bad eyes! I mean, I get that it was probably minor and hadn't really affected Curry all that much, at least not until perhaps very recently, but still: The guy just said it feels like the whole world has opened up. Wouldn't it stand to reason the basket is going to look a little more open now, too? The dude is like Rick Vaughn in "Major League." We might've just unleashed the second coming of the Wild Thing!
Well, Harden went for another 50-spot. Ho-hum. This time it was against the Kings on 13-of-31 shooting, including 7 of 23 from three. It's hard to look at shooting percentages like that and not wonder how many other elite scorers could be doing this with similar freedom, but on the other hand, that would be discrediting the sheer talent required to even get that many clean looks a game. Harden's iso tempo, handles, craftiness, effortless upper-body strength on his step-back three, these things are nearly as impressive as the scoring outputs themselves.
That said, there is, I believe, a growing sentiment that Harden is rising in the game's elite hierarchy, and personally, I don't believe that to be true. He was a top-4 to a top-7 player at worst last year, and he's still that. Not many people could do what he's doing -- except for the guys that were better than him before and remain better than him. LeBron, Durant, and Curry are better players. You can quibble about Harden, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Anthony Davis and Kawhi Leonard. That's always been true, and it still is. You give nay one of those guys this many looks at the hoop, especially the first three, and they would be doing the same thing Harden is, if not more.
The X-factor, of course, is the free throws. Again, it's a skill that Harden can draw contact the way he does. Most of it is legit; the idea that he's acting his way into a majority of his calls is false. He mostly draws contact because guys can't stay in front of him. So fair play. Those free throws are where his consistency lies. A bad shooting night can still turn into a 35-40 point game if you're getting 20 free throws. I don't know if LeBron or Durant could get to the line as consistently, even if they made it a concerted priority. I'm pretty much positive Curry couldn't.
This is all a long way of saying: Harden is brilliant. But he's always been brilliant. He's added a better floater game and the step-back is an unguardable shot, but in terms of superstar hierarchy, Harden is still outside the top three for sure. And he shouldn't be the MVP. That belongs to Giannis.
