After Durant left, there was endless speculation that Westbrook would leave, too, and it would have been hard to blame him if he had. Looking around the league, Westbrook would have seen almost nothing but bigger cities with stronger teams and better restaurants and livelier fashion scenes — any one of which would have bent over backward for the chance to add him to its mix. Instead, Westbrook signed a contract extension to stay in Oklahoma. It was, in some ways, a crazy choice, unreasonable on many levels, which made it of course the perfect Westbrook thing to do.

Westbrook once told me that growing up in Los Angeles, he had no idea Oklahoma City even existed. And yet he has become, in his odd balance of chaos and control, his volatile lurching toward greatness, a sort of human embodiment of the place. Westbrook was already beloved in OKC, but his decision to stay turned him into a legend. The city was hung with banners saying “WHY NOT?” and the tallest skyscraper lit up with Westbrook’s name: “THANK YOU RUSS.”

“There are people in Oklahoma City who hold themselves differently because of Russell Westbrook,” Sam Presti, the Thunder’s general manager, told me. “I mean that literally. They stand up straighter. People, not necessarily athletes, draw confidence from him and his disregard for the judgment or labeling from others. I’m confident that there are a lot of people in this city that go into job interviews saying to themselves: ‘Come on, you’ve got this — be Westbrook, think Westbrook.’ And that might actually help them get the job, and if they don’t, they walk out feeling sorry for the person that missed the opportunity to hire them.”

This is the lesson of Russell Westbrook. In a deeply imperfect world — a world where a shooting touch will suddenly abandon you at the worst possible moment, where your teammates might not be good enough to make a win possible, where an economy might suddenly collapse for no apparent reason, where the decency of strangers cannot be presumed — in a world like that, Westbrook’s approach to life might actually be the most rational one. You control the things you can control (family, daily routines, the occasional big choice) and outside that you fling yourself with wild abandon, every day, at every object that seems worthy of pursuit. In the absence of guarantees, in the absence of certainty, in the new American volatility, we can bank on only one thing: total presence, total sincerity, total effort, all the time. That is the sound of one hand clapping.

Westbrook’s critics have been very loud for many years. They are quieter today, but they’re still out there, disputing the magnitude of his triple-doubles by pointing to his high turnover rate and his low shooting percentage, his inefficiencies, his mistakes. But, as Billy Donovan, the Thunder’s head coach, told me, this is missing the point. “Before you go to the criticism,” Donovan said, “you have to understand Russell Westbrook. The No. 1 thing for him is how hard he competes. It starts there. That doesn’t mean he plays a perfect game, doesn’t mean that he never turns the ball over, doesn’t mean that he doesn’t miss a defensive assignment. But when the ball is loose on the glass or on the floor, when it requires energy and passion and fire — Russell is bringing that. So many players live with regret: They could have done a little bit more, been more committed, worked harder. I think he’s going to have a great level of peace when his time is done. He’s going to be able to move on with his life. He’s going to have peace in his heart.”

Through 41 games, the official halfway point of the season, Russell Westbrook was actually doing it: He was averaging a triple-double — 30.7 points, 10.5 assists, and 10.7 rebounds. Stat-heads calculated that, if you adjusted Westbrook’s numbers to reflect the pace of the Oscar Robertson era, they would look like nothing we’ve ever seen in the history of anything: nearly 50 points, 17 rebounds, 17 assists. Historical comparisons are impossible to draw in such a linear way, of course. But still. It is possible that we are witnessing, in real time, a performance as aberrant as anything any of the primordial basketball legends (Wilt, Oscar, Bill Russell, Pistol Pete) ever did. We may as well start broadcasting Westbrook’s games in grainy black and white.

And the second half of the season may actually be better. Westbrook’s self-mythology — his belief that he is an underdog — was no doubt stoked last month when he learned that, despite all his exorbitant numbers, despite his decision to stay in Oklahoma, despite the game-winning shots and the surprising success of his relatively untalented team, he was not chosen to start in this year’s All-Star Game. His spot was taken by a player more popular with N.B.A. fans, the ever-sunny Steph Curry — Kevin Durant’s new point guard. So Westbrook did what he does and launched himself into his next triple-double.