It wasn’t just the finish that swayed me. But it didn't hurt.

Make no mistake, the triple-double flurry at the end of this season certainly helped Russell Westbrook’s MVP cause with plenty of voters, but he’d already built a compelling case regardless.

Nit-picking the statistical specifics of his season compared to that of the Houston Rockets' James Harden is an exercise I suspect will last for months and perhaps years (and certainly over the course of the next four to potentially seven games in the first-round playoff series between the Rockets and Thunder).

In the end, though, Westbrook won me over with a relentlessness that saw him break Oscar Robertson’s record for triple-doubles in a season. That feat allowed him to join "The Big O" as the only players in league history to finish a season with a triple-double average. He did all of that while also lifting the Thunder into the playoffs (when it was clear that they’d have fallen woefully short of that status without him doing what he did).