On Sunday night, as I watched a game between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Denver Nuggets, I realized that the past two or so N.B.A. seasons have changed me, maybe permanently, as a fan. I barely glanced at the score, or, for that matter, at the vast majority of the players who spent time on the floor. Instead, I watched Russell Westbrook. I appreciated—as it has become almost a cliché of basketball fandom to appreciate—his ferocity and fearlessness, intensity and reckless control, all of which verge on the insane. He leapt for rebounds, then exploded—as usual—into careening downcourt swoops, often stopping on a dime at the free-throw line to execute his signature pull-up jumper. But it was hard, on this night, to maintain a narrow focus on his sheer athletic excellence: I was praying for assists. Westbrook’s quest to average a triple-double for the season—purposeful and highly personal, despite his season-long claims to the contrary—had already been accomplished; the only milestone left was to break Oscar Robertson’s record of forty-one triple-doubles in a single season. By halftime it was clear that he’d have enough points and rebounds, and so, until the tenth assist—a whip pass to the rookie Semaj Christon, who hit a corner three—I cursed Westbrook’s teammates as they missed shot after shot that would have finished the deed.

Westbrook’s striving has, in the course of the season, become a meta-entertainment, a game within the game, much in the same way that Steph Curry’s freewheeling dominance—on the way to four hundred and two three-pointers, a casual demolition of his own record—made last year’s Golden State Warriors a non-stop, circensian attraction. Minor versions of this phenomenon now bloom across the league: on a given night, it’s possible to root for John Wall’s sprinting forays to the hoop; Kawhi Leonard’s swallowing defense from half-court to the paint; DeMarcus (Boogie) Cousins’s dizzying footwork (and awful temper) on the block; Draymond Green’s ruthless versatility; Giannis Antetokounmpo’s long-limbed omnipresence on the court—all while maintaining a perfect indifference to the fortunes of their respective teams. (As the writer Nathaniel Friedman noted a couple of years ago, N.B.A. League Pass, which allows fans to watch all the games outside their local markets, probably has something to do with the rise of a more catholic form of basketball fandom.) A proliferation of talent in the N.B.A.—and a liberation of that talent, particularly on the offensive end, due to new rules and the steadily increasing use of the three-point shot—means that nearly every team has a star worth fawning over, and that every imaginable statistical record stands under nightly threat. The Phoenix Suns’ Devin Booker recently scored seventy points against the Boston Celtics, becoming just the sixth player to tally that many in a game—you’ve heard of the other five guys—and I barely had time to notice.

The competitive, team-centric aspects of the sport are undiminished, but, at the same time, every individual game, even between lesser teams, holds tantalizing potential. This is the lasting importance of Westbrook’s absurd 2016-17 season: it crystallizes a new era of enjoyment in professional hoops. Thus the confusion over who deserves this year’s M.V.P. award. The obviousness of Westbrook’s preëminent “value” this year is impossible to establish using the old metrics (by which, for the record, LeBron James deserves the M.V.P. almost every year). Yes, he has provided wins for his team, and for his home fans, just as the other leading candidates—Leonard, James, and James Harden—have. But his exploits have also provided an unparalleled quantity of ecstasy for the rest of us. He even offered extracurricular intrigue—it was impossible to watch him without the thought that he was exacting protracted revenge against his former teammate, Kevin Durant, now playing for Golden State, the team that dramatically defeated the Thunder in the playoffs last year. The tension—and, on occasion, outright animus—when the Thunder faced the Warriors was sometimes hard to bear.

Of course, having secured the record, Westbrook wasn’t done with his Sunday-night performance. He went on to reach fifty points, the last three of which he earned by way of a last-second, game-winning shot that officially eradicated the Nuggets’ chances of appearing in the playoffs. Off a hurried pass from the center Steven Adams, he leapt upward, almost perfectly vertical, like a passenger on a rocket, and rushed the ball into its path toward the goal. When it sailed through, he ran toward his teammates, who had already begun to celebrate, and jumped toward them with his fist in the air. Even that leap was impressive. No matter who wins the M.V.P. award—or, for that matter, the championship—this season belonged to Westbrook.