Russell Westbrook is digging his heels in. The Oklahoma City Thunder point guard, who is also the most exciting player in basketball, has decided to stay put in one of the NBA’s most remote and lusterless markets despite the defection of Kevin Durant and the full attention and willing wallets of Los Angeles, New York City, and just about everywhere else. His one-man, end-to-end fast breaks, ceaseless snarling and eminently marketable energy will remain a spectacle that takes place primarily in a flat expanse of dust, with no other pro sports franchises nearby.

This is thrilling. While a superstar changing teams is always the more nuclear, news-exploding story, Westbrook holding pattern in Oklahoma is just as dynamic a statement as Durant starting anew with the Golden State Warriors in the Bay. His three-year, $85 million contract extension signals a new type of contender out west: one where the prerogatives for the restless guard to push the pace into wormhole speeds, attack the rim with vengeance, and hunt loose balls and rebounds like no one his size ever has will no longer have reason to give way. The Durant-Westbrook experiment, the most compelling duo in the sport while it existed, has ended. Never a natural pairing, the hustle-and-flow thrust of the two was completely unstoppable when it held synergy, but usually just too good in measure of pure talent to beat, anyway, when it often wasn’t working.

In the wake of this most curious tandem lies two very different teams, and two superstars who will now enjoy habitats much more suited to their respective skills and dispositions. The Warriors are a megatron-battleship-destroyer stable of warhorses that includes three of the most gifted scorers in the history of the game in Durant, Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, plus two zealously committed, endlessly versatile glue men in Draymond Green and Andre Iguodala. In all likelihood, they will not be beaten in 16-17. Here Durant can do what he has always been more comfortable with and aspirational toward by blending his All-NBA talents into the larger ideal of Team, and that team in its selflessness and collective talents projects to form a leviathan that will swallow the NBA whole.

Westbrook has always been such a maniacal, sweat-inducing roller coaster to behold because of how he tries to eat up the league all on his own. Save for LeBron James, there is no player more built for this quixotic task than him. Westbrook will now be flanked by athletic, ostensibly willing surrogates like Andre Roberson, Victor Oladipo and Steven Adams, and while the new-look Thunder as a well-built extension of his singular will can probably not defeat the Warriors in a seven-game series, they might be the most exhausting team in the NBA, and no one will look forward to playing them. Everyone, to the contrary, should look forward to watching them, and they are now an early favorite to be the sport’s leading cult team.

But what Westbrook’s extension means for NBA narrative at large is perhaps much more important than its impact on the floor. One of the most coveted players and personalities in sports has rejected the ideology inherent in Durant’s exodus; the market dictates that he should leave, but Westbrook has decided to hold to his gritty mission and stay. Just by signing that contract, and before he has plays one minute on it, Westbrook has become a folk hero of the highest order. 

Despite his avant-garde fashion predilections that lead him often to the side of runways in Manhattan and Paris, he has doubled down on a city where a Sooners polo shirt to go with mesh shorts and flip flops bought at Target would probably not be that taboo of an outfit choice. Just as Westbrook stands tall to the challenge of chasing a title in a superteam league all on his own, he accepts the assignment of seeing how global his brand can become without taking it to a key metropolis. In denying the manifest destiny of the Lakers—wouldn’t his sponsors be elated by that, and wouldn’t he collect dozens of more sponsors?—Westbrook takes a job in which he is a carrier of paradoxes, a lone gunman in a dull desert who is also an urbane trendsetter in Bushwick; the ambitions of John Wayne and Kanye West both.

Basketball-wise, many will contend that better decisions could’ve been made, but that assumes a lot about Westbrook’s goals. The quick ascension he and Durant enjoyed together as youngsters makes Russell feel like an old friend, a veteran whose time is limited. But he is merely 27, and will be in his prime for the whole of this contract. He has chosen to spend that precious time in the same small and modest place he has been, even though an atomic basketball bomb has just been taken from him by the current capital of American mega-commerce. Westbrook is staying in Oklahoma so to race towards obstacles more impossible yet.