Did some people not get the cupcake thing right away? Lee Jenkins presented it in his October profile of Russell Westbrook as a bit of Kendrick Perkins-invented slang—he called teammates “cupcake” if he thought they were acting a little soft—but I had an elementary school gym teacher who threw the term around. When Kevin Durant fled Oklahoma City for Oakland on July 4th and Russ Instagrammed a festive cupcake tower, it was clear what he was getting at. Russ’s face is like a sheet of scowling flint. You get the sense he has still-cooking beefs that date back to the nursery. And the modern athlete frequently speaks in easily decrypted shade. No one has ever puzzled for more than a moment or two over what LeBron James is complaining about on Twitter, even though he rarely names names. Westbrook’s desserts were a similarly facile code to crack.

He isn’t wrong to be aggrieved about Durant’s departure, but the moral high ground is all that belongs to Russ these days. On Saturday night, the Thunder down by eighteen points late in the third quarter, Russ repeatedly yelled I’m coming! at Durant as the two teams retreated to their respective benches after a timeout. Durant’s response: you’re losing, though. Russ was flanked by a besuited Enes Kanter. His statline at that point in the game was 35 points, 10 rebounds, seven assists, and eight turnovers. The moment, by itself, explains Russ’s season. He’s overmatched, brilliant, pushing too hard, and permanently incensed. 

Of course, this was true to a lesser extent even when Kevin Durant was still his teammate. Russ’s game is characterized by a barely contained rage and a self-belief that dwarfs even his own estimable ability. A lot of OKC playoff series ended with Russ forgetting his more talented co-star for minutes at a time in service of a point he wasn’t ever quite able to make. Heart cooks brain, etc. When Durant left, there were whispers that Russ’s erratic play was part of the reason. It doesn’t particularly matter whether that’s true or not. It scans. It reveals a truth about Russell Westbrook, which is that he’s impenetrable. There are some things you can’t teach him, some ways he won’t reform.

That’s not a value judgment. Kobe and Jordan compromised as little as possible en route to their championships. Iverson never totally grasped what he wasn’t capable of, but he’s still an all-time great. By all accounts, Russ is bright, coachable, and a good teammate. Competitiveness just overcomes him. On Monday night, against the Wizards, he swooped across the lane and Bradley Beal took a mistimed swipe at the ball, striking him on the hand. The slow-mo replay caught Russ momentarily apoplectic, as if Beal had buzzed by in a Jeep and sprayed him with puddle-water, or as if basketball isn’t a contact sport in which players occasionally violate each other’s bodily autonomy. The ref immediately called a foul. It was no big deal. But no one else in the league would have uncorked that caliber of screwface for a routine hand-slap in a midwinter regular season game. I scribbled in my notes: why is Russ so keyed up right now?

It’s possible some aftershocks from Saturday’s Golden State tussle were still throbbing through him, but this season as a whole has been watching a man at the end of his rope pull out his leg and armpit hairs in order to weave more of it. Russ is gnawing on his plate; he’s smoking the filter. On the one hand, it’s mesmerizing to see the full breadth of his skill splayed across the more or less blank canvas he’s afforded and on the other, when he’s having an off night or his teammates are letting him down, the severity of his effort can be excruciating. Other stars on doomed teams get chewed out for not giving their all every night, but it turns out that approach has its merits. At least you carve fewer lines into your audience’s faces. 

It’s always interesting when a player gets loosed from the context in which we’ve understood them for years. Some instances of this are happier than others. Steve Nash joined Mike D’Antoni’s Suns and blossomed. Kevin Garnett, after a decade-plus of downright Catholic devotion to the Timberwolves, allowed himself to play with a title contender in Boston. Dwight Howard’s Lakers switch was a disaster. But the way Westbrook has found himself in a new situation is unusual: players of his stature do not tend to get left behind. LeBron returned to Cleveland because Dwyane Wade was well past his prime. Kobe and Shaq split up because the former ran the latter out of town. Russ wanted Durant to stay. He simply didn’t. 

Russ is making the best of it. With the freedom of captaining a just-okay team, he’s constructing his brutal masterpiece: a beautifully useless argument against Durant’s decision. He’ll probably win MVP and average something close to a triple-double, two accomplishments he claims not to care about but obviously does. Night to night, he proves that stat-chasing and winning basketball are basically the same thing, and the distinction between the two isn’t meaningful with respect to the Thunder. It’s not like his headstrong verve is going to cost them a championship this year.

And that is, finally, the sadness that shades the entire pursuit. Russ likely doesn’t think about it much, if at all. He doesn’t seem like a person who suffers existential dread. But we can ask the question: how long can he go on like this? He doesn’t look exhausted, but he’s playing with a mania that suggests exhaustion is inevitable. Watching it is already getting grim. After he’s spattered his spite across every inch of the schedule, what’s left to do? Russ will have to find a new argument to make, or go on repeating himself like a madman.