Russell Westbrook is many things: indomitable, fiery, unbridled, impetuous, relentless, unpredictable, impervious, lurid, fractious, and frequently confounding. With this guy, there’s no in-between. Westbrook is either galvanizing an entire arena or, as he did in Friday’s loss to the Spurs, ham-fistedly running the Thunder into the ground. Rarely, if ever, is Russell Westbrook inconsequential.

That’s why, for Westbrook devotees like me, last night’s win over the surprisingly wan Spurs was both revealing and bittersweet. OKC looked sharp, balanced, and altogether capable of testing San Antonio’s mettle. Kevin Durant, who finished with 41 points, was magnificent down the stretch, creating space for himself and finding opportunities while staring down reigning Defensive Player of the Year Kawhi Leonard. The Thunder didn’t just even up the series—they made themselves credible.

Westbrook, though, was the odd man out. As the Thunder asserted themselves time and time again, he was nowhere to be found. He was a willing distributor from the outset, finishing with 15 assists and, despite his subdued play, still managed to score 18 points on a cringe-worthy 5 for 18 from the floor. Westbrook showed up in the most traditional sense of the word, pulling his weight as a starting point guard and sound teammate. But what’s remarkable here is how little impact his playmaking or poor shooting seemed to have on the overall trajectory of the Thunder. The real Russell Westbrook was nowhere to be found.

Maybe, uncharacteristically, the criticism he caught for Friday’s poor showing had gotten to him. Maybe he was hearing it from his teammates, especially Durant, who was noticeably pissed during Game Three. Whatever the cause, Westbrook never quite looked himself last night. It wasn’t just the lack of aggression or his sudden, pedestrian urge to give up the ball. There was simply none of the hell-bent desire we associate with Russ.

"Westbrook is a total anomaly whose genius lies in his ability to fuck shit up. He’s a throwback to brilliant-but-flawed stars like Tracy McGrady, Rasheed Wallace, Chris Webber, Vince Carter, and of course, Allen Iverson, players defined as much by their inconsistencies and shortcomings as their sheer ability."

Westbrook is not so much a selfish player as he is self-centered, off on his own trip in a way that makes him nearly impossible to deter—or ignore. He’s frequently criticized for making poor decisions late in games or chasing down some private demon that’s only tangentially related to the task of winning basketball games. But his passion and determination are undeniable. He is often the Thunder’s greatest liability—but he is still their heart and soul.

Westbrook’s chosen mode of play is so outré that there’s little distinction between wreaking havoc on opponents and pulverizing his own team. Therein lies the central tension, and it was largely absent last night. He can come across as strangely oblivious to just how much presence he has, like a kid unsure of how his mood affects those around him. For better or worse, you can’t take Westbrook out of his game. That is unless—as we seemed to witness in Game Four—he decides to do it himself.

Here’s the catch: The Thunder looked great in his virtual absence. Kevin Durant’s calm, measured style set the tone and—as they did in Westbrook’s prolonged absence back in 2013-14, Durant’s MVP season—they looked as cohesive as ever. Westbrook has the ability to make or break the Thunder on every possession, something completely foreign to Durant’s approach. If KD exists as a part of a free-flowing basketball ecosystem, Russ is a virus running wild. What happens when Westbrook removes himself from the equation isn’t necessarily better or worse. It’s just different.

That’s because, in a general sense, Durant is more in line with the current state of the game. The rise of analytics has teams trying to stamp out inefficiencies and cut back on waste. This climate favors optimized players whose logic is immediately apparent; KD’s approach is in the same vein as that of LeBron James, who is as close to perfect as a basketball player can get, or Steph Curry, whose game pursues the impossible because, for him, it’s not. Or look at Kawhi Leonard and Draymond Green, who have elevated solid all-around play to its own kind of dynamism.

The NBA has entered a new age of responsibility, where players are constantly being audited and expected to account for their on-court actions like never before (no, I’m not talking about the culture of negativity that sprang up out of sports talk radio and cranks like Skip Bayless). This has made the game decidedly less rough around the edges. It’s both more beautiful and more fully-realized, at once unattainable and, in its appeal to basic values, instantly relatable. A fundamental belief in “the Right Way” has gone from crusty dogma to an idea that has revitalized the game. “Putting on a clinic” refers to both modeling good behavior and neatly eviscerating the opposing team.

Against this backdrop of rationality, Westbrook is a total anomaly whose genius lies in his ability to fuck shit up. He’s a throwback to brilliant-but-flawed stars like Tracy McGrady, Rasheed Wallace, Chris Webber, Vince Carter, and of course, Allen Iverson, players defined as much by their inconsistencies and shortcomings as their sheer ability. Their play, at once maddening and frightening magnetic, was decidedly imperfect. And you rooted for them because you understood what it meant to succeed and fail at the same time because that’s what most people do most of the time. As shoddy as the product could be at times, it was infinitely more human.