Russell Westbrook can be stingy with his words, but lucky for us his facial expressions give like the Gateses. There's the face, meant for the opposing team's bench when he dunks over their tallest player, that says something like, “I just scored two better points than you'll ever score in your career.” There's the face the Oklahoma City Thunder star makes when he's high-fiving his teammates and one pulls his hand away too soon, a face that says, “I will bite your fucking pharynx out if you don't march back over here and make contact with my hand.” There's the face when a reporter asks a question he doesn't like that says, “I know you have young children, which is why I'm not gonna humiliate you in a viral Vine.” And sometimes, as now, on this open-air patio in Beverly Hills, a long way from a packed NBA arena, there's the face I've seen a bunch this afternoon: head canted, nostrils flared, eyebrows appealing to all possibility—a 3-D emoticon shrug that says: “Why not?”

It's a mantra that's governed his disposition as long as he's been in the spotlight, evident in the unflinching way he both plays the game and picks his clothes (fashion's his other fixation). But his embrace of the phrase Why not? goes back to well before he was famous. “My friends and I started that motto early in high school,” Westbrook says. “That attitude, that mentality, from way back then: Want to go to Stanford? Why not? Want to play in the NBA? Why not? I was never the best player. Not ever in my life. Though even when I was younger, I felt that on any given day I could be. And that mentality's what's helped me get over the hump each and every day to where I was meant to go.”

To UCLA. To Oklahoma City. To the NBA Finals, five All-Star teams, an All-NBA First Team. And now, to a lonely new altitude—the sole superstar on a team that forever had two, the odds-on favorite for league MVP. Here is someone who hasn't been the best player on his own team since high school, and all at once he's poised to be not just the focal point of a franchise, but perhaps the best player in the entire league.

There're those giant shoulders shrugging and that face again. Why not?

T-shirt, $300, Balmain at Barneys New York / Track pants, $450, by Burberry Sneakers, $735, by Pierre Hardy / Navy bracelet throughout Del Toro

In the wake of the disaster of last spring's Western Conference Finals, the hypotheticals ticked like dominoes. If Westbrook's Thunder had beaten the Warriors, do they handle the Cavs in the Finals? If they handle the Cavs in the Finals, does Kevin Durant feel itchy for an out? Does he leave the team he transformed for the hated Warriors, the super-team, the Steph+Klay+Draymond starting-All Star squad? More to the point: If the Thunder beat the Warriors, does Kevin Durant leave Russell Westbrook behind?

After that series loss, it seemed like things in Oklahoma City couldn't ever again exist as they had. This is grossly overstating it, but Westbrook and Durant were like the palest version of a married couple who'd lost a child and wound up divorced. In the days that followed Durant's departure, Westbrook was said to be angry and hurt, but he stayed largely quiet. Even now, months later, he's careful with his words. He knows how things can sound, knows the value of striking a conciliatory tone.

“I mean, obviously in the NBA there's a lot of different decisions that people make,” he says. “The whole thing in the NBA is that people sometimes have an opportunity to go where they want. And Kevin chose a place where he wanted to go.”

So, have they talked much since?

“Uhh, not much, no.”

In the wake of Durant's departure, Westbrook weighed his own future in Oklahoma City. His “process” was discussed each night on SportsCenter as though he'd been lining up suitors the way Durant had.

“Honestly, I never even thought I had a chance of playing in college.”

“But it wasn't like that at all for me. There was no process. It was just very simple,” Westbrook says. “I wasn't trying to figure out if I was leaving or not. I was happy where—I am happy where—I'm at. It's very simple.”

It was this simple: three years, $85 million. By staying, he'd become the league's second-highest-paid player (tied with KD, among others, and behind only LeBron), the centerpiece of a franchise that, for the better part of a decade, has been right there, but never fully across the line. Westbrook had always been the second threat. The speed and the power, the decoy before the dish. But what would it mean now that the team was his alone?

Entering high school, Westbrook was five feet nine, a hundred and sixty pounds, couldn't touch the rim. He didn't even try out for varsity and wouldn't make it until his junior year. He wasn't the best player at his school, and he wasn't even the top player on his block—that was his best friend, Khelcey Barrs. “At the time, he was probably the best basketball player I'd ever seen,” Westbrook says. When coaches came to Leuzinger High School games, they were there to see Barrs. It was Barrs's dream to play at UCLA, more than anywhere else. But in late May of their sophomore year, during the last of a long afternoon of pickup games, Barrs collapsed and died on account of an undiagnosed enlarged heart.

“Obviously, it's something that's always going to be a part of my life,” Westbrook says. “What I do and where I do it. Always playing for him and his spirit.”

Westbrook says that from that point forward, he was carrying on for two. He began helping Barrs's grandmother, doing Khelcey's chores, and on the court, he doubled his efforts. His senior year, everything changed again. He sprouted to his full-size six feet three. He led the league in scoring by a long shot. He dunked for the first time (“a very small dunk, a barely dunk, a way-up-on-the-fingertips dunk”). Still, Westbrook wasn't hearing from big schools: “I was just trying to figure out a way to get to college without my parents having to pay. It was very expensive, and we couldn't afford that. And basketball—I was just playing because it was something that I loved at the time. Honestly, I never even thought I had a chance of playing in college.”

Finally, just before graduation, Westbrook signed with UCLA. A college that offered him free housing and free food. That it happened to have been Barrs's dream school made the reality all the richer. “Part of that was me and part of that was him.”

Though Westbrook had spent his entire life in Los Angeles, he'd never really ventured to the UCLA part of town. “I just stayed where I lived in the neighborhood. The far side of the park I grew up at and that was it,” he says. “I'd never been to the west side before. It was a big deal for me to be over here. I'd never been on this side of town.”

In this instance, Westbrook's “over here” and “this side of town” are an umbrella for both UCLA's Westwood and Beverly Hills, where we're sitting on a patio on the top floor of Barneys, where he prefers to shop when he shops anymore, which he really doesn't, because designers preemptively send him most of what he'd ever want, anyway. He's comfortable “over here.” He's smiling a lot, he's laughing a lot, he's making fun of my shirt. Last year, he married his college girlfriend, Nina, at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He just bought a house on “this side of town,” too. Ten years ago, though, Russell was 17 years old, at the very outset of a transformative decade. And to mark the occasion, he picked a new number. “I could pick any one, and I picked 0. It was a new chapter in my life. A new start.”

“I only know how to play one way. I can't, like, decide to turn the switch on and off.”

When he arrived at UCLA, Westbrook rode the bench on a squad that had just lost in the national-championship game. “It was just: I'm here, that's fine. I thought I hadn't done anything yet, so my mentality was to come in and try to get on the court.” It wasn't until his sophomore season, when a teammate's pivotal injury thrust him into the starting lineup, that Westbrook seized an opportunity he'd been preparing for all summer. “I worked out twice a day until the season started, lifting, running; I didn't take a break.” He added ten pounds of muscle, several inches to his vertical. He played pickup games with Kobe and Kevin Garnett—games he treated with the characteristic intensity he's practically patented. “That was a turning point for me,” he says of that sophomore season. “I had the opportunity to showcase my talent—since we were a very well-watched team that year—to help me draw the attention of the NBA.”

Westbrook became the playmaker we recognize today, the guy who draws just enough attention—from defenders, from reporters—to make space for his teammates to thrive. After that sophomore season, when the general manager of the then Seattle SuperSonics, Sam Presti, asked other prospects which players they feared most, they said Westbrook's name again and again. The defensive intensity, the high drive. Presti went out on a limb and drafted Westbrook fourth.

The Sonics' new point guard appeared at just a single press conference in Seattle before the team relocated to Oklahoma City. He thought about ditching the number 0. “But I said, ‘You know what? This is another new chapter, another fresh start, at the bottom again.’”

The Oklahoman Tuxedo: “I love denim on denim. You may not think you can pull it off, but have you ever worn a chambray shirt with jeans? That’s basically the same thing. You’re pretty much there.” / Shirt, $995, by Valentino at Barneys New York / Jeans, $349, by True Religion / Belt by Gucci / Sneakers by Jordan Brand

“Before I got there, I didn't know where Oklahoma City was. I didn't know it existed.”

His mom helped him pick out a house. Helped him find a place with a good kitchen and a refrigerator and everything. Took all his calls, which were many. He was still a teenager, trying to figure out how to run a whole house, how to do all the shopping for himself. Mom had even bought all his clothes up to that point. “I called her all the time,” Westbrook says. “Probably annoyed her. If I went to the grocery store, I asked her all the questions, she'd lay it out for me.” Westbrook went out a lot on his own. He was looking for a new hobby, so he started hanging around a bowling alley, taking pointers from a pro there named Anne Marie. Wasn't long before he was bowling regularly in the 180s, 190s. “All about consistency,” he says. I'm going to be the best.