National Basketball Association

Is Russell Westbrook better suited coming off the bench for the Lakers?

Updated Oct. 22, 2021 8:41 p.m. ET

"Go home and watch a comedy."

LeBron James just wanted to see Russell Westbrook smile after his disappointing Lakers debut.

There wasn't much for Westbrook to be happy about Tuesday night, as the nine-time All-Star valiantly tried to ingratiate himself with the team he has dreamed of playing for since childhood.

But his first game with the purple and yellow was anything but dreamy.

Westbrook finished with eight points, five boards, four assists and four turnovers. It was the first time in more than 100 games that he failed to reach double digits in at least one of those categories. He also went 0-for-4 from 3-point range and registered four personal fouls.

Westbrook posted the eighth-lowest game score of his 14-year career, a disastrous metric by his own standards in what was arguably one of the most important regular-season games of his life.

But his teammates told him not to worry about it. "He’s so hard on himself," James said in reference to Westbrook's debut. "I don't want to him to be too hard on himself. That was the one thing that I hoped to get through to him."

Westbrook seems determined to go into the next game with a clean slate and will undoubtedly give the utmost effort in striving to do so. His work ethic has never elicited questions, but his fit with this team is an entirely different story.

In fact, it has the basketball world in a collective clamor, and Skip Bayless believes Westbrook is best suited as a contributor off the bench.

"When Russ is Russ, nobody else is anybody else," Bayless said Friday on "Undisputed."

"It's just a wrong-headed fit. It will not work. I feel sorry for everybody involved. He needs to be Manu Ginóbili, but he will not accept being the Sixth Man of the Year. If he said, ‘I will come off the bench at the six-minute mark in the first quarter. I'll still get my 30 minutes, but I will do it mostly leading the second team, and we will crush,' it would change the flavor of the game. [They'd] go 1,000 miles an hour. The tempo will change, and they'll go on runs that will have Staples on its feet.

"You are facing the all-time identity crisis named Russell West-brick. He is simply the worst superstar jump-shooter I've ever seen, and it's not even close. He's a slam dunk first-ballot Hall of Famer that you can't find a place for in this starting lineup."

But Shannon Sharpe isn't worried in the slightest.

"I expect [them] to be 2-1 and get back on track," he said. "They'll play a lot better in the next two games than they did in the opening one. LeBron and AD will be themselves. The question is, how do we unlock Russell? You need a slimmed down version of him. If he can give you 15-to-17 points, seven-to-eight assists and rebounds, that's good. But he's not going to have the ball all the time.

Sharpe had further thoughts on the team's lineup combinations.

"Rondo and Russ should NOT play together," he added vehemently. "Rondo, Melo and Russ shouldn't either. I expect LeBron and AD to continue what they started opening night. I expect Russ to play a lot better than he did on opening night, and I think they get a close, hard-fought victory against Phoenix."

Lakers head coach Frank Vogel isn't worried, either. On Thursday, he called solving the Westbrook dilemma an "easy fix."

"We didn't get him involved enough, and that's on me," Vogel said after the team's practice. "But he played pretty good. We're continuing to look at situations to make him useful and not pull away from what [Anthony Davis] and [LeBron James] are doing.

"Him more than anybody, it's going to be an adjustment period," Vogel added. "He's coming into our culture, our system. He's the new guy, and he's got to find his way. … He's going to be great for us, but it's going to be an adjustment period."

Check out the full "Undisputed" debate here!

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