OKLAHOMA CITY — For so much of his career, this had been Russell Westbrook’s sweet spot.
And so he sought it out Sunday night in the hopes of capping a rally, of leading his Thunder team to a win it maybe didn’t deserve but had fought hard to steal from the Memphis Grizzlies. Westbrook fired from 19 feet and found what he — and his team — so desperately needed. A bucket, a late lead, and soon after, some relief.
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“Just reading (the screen), just got to use it,” Westbrook said after the Thunder’s 99-95 win against the Grizzlies. “That’s what I live and die by.”
This season there’s been little life in the midrange.
Westbrook entered the night shooting 31.8 percent on midrange jumpers, lowest in his career, and a drop-off of more than 10 percentage points from his MVP season two years ago.
But he is nothing if not an unflinching believer in his next shot.
Sometimes his faith puts the Thunder in tight spots.
And some nights, like Sunday, it delivers OKC from them.
Memphis looked set to send the Thunder to a third straight loss without Paul George, a fourth straight overall and a sixth in seven games until Westbrook — and the OKC defense — found another gear.
The Thunder trailed by as many as 13 points in the fourth quarter, but they outscored the Grizzlies 23-6 over the final 6:30. Westbrook scored 12 points during that stretch, shooting 4-for-7 from the floor. Memphis was 1 for 13.
Prior to that game-saving stretch, Westbrook was 2-for-9 from 3-point range. In that final 6:30, he hit 2-of-4 3s, including one from 27 feet to tie the score at 93-93 with 1:04 to play.
It was in some ways a throwback to his MVP season, when Westbrook made a habit of pulling the Thunder back from the brink of defeat.
He’s done it less this season, both because George has done so much of the heavy lifting and because the shots he made so often that season have been so hard to come by. The Grizzlies were the latest team to pack the paint against the Thunder, to dare Westbrook to launch from long range.
Through three quarters, Westbrook had made 3-of-13 shots. The Thunder had looked mostly flat. Through the first 36 minutes, OKC trailed 75-67 and its leading scorer was backup small forward Abdel Nader, who had 12 points.
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Oklahoma City was shooting 31.9 percent from the floor entering the fourth quarter, and it seemed doomed to a bad loss.
The bulk of the game was “annoying,” said OKC center Steven Adams, who had 13 points and 22 rebounds.
But it could have been worse.
There are no must-win NBA games in early March, but this resembled one for the Thunder, whose hold on the No. 3 spot in the Western Conference had evaporated — they needed a win Sunday to keep pace with Portland — and whose offense had flatlined with George sidelined by shoulder soreness.
George was not coming to save the day.
So Westbrook found a way.
He scored 12 points in the fourth quarter after managing 10 in the first three. He had three field goals in the first three quarters, four in the fourth. He grabbed three rebounds in the final quarter, equaling his total in the first three.
His ability to find something in the fourth, to will a win on a night when he’d looked mostly out of sorts offensively, is “what makes him the player he is,” Thunder coach Billy Donovan said.
“Everybody goes through adversity,” Donovan said. “Everybody goes through struggles. It’s never an easy road for any player, because of the level of talent and competitiveness. But the guys that have high-level talent, to me, what separates them is how they handle adversity. Both personally and collectively as a team. Those to me are the greatest guys.”
Westbrook created some of his own adversity Sunday. He had seemed out of sync most of the night, his defensive rotations a step slow, his shot selection questionable. He had airballed a pair of 3-pointers and hit the backboard hard with another.
It might have been his worst game of the season, right up until he finished it with perhaps his finest flourish of the year.
It scarcely could have come at a better time.
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Memphis is 25-40. Like the Thunder, it was playing on the second night of a back-to-back and without a star player — point guard Mike Conley, who sat with what the team called “general soreness.”
On Tuesday, the Thunder open a four-game road trip that will include games against a Clippers team fighting to be in the playoffs and teams in Portland and Utah that are battling OKC for playoff position.
With no sense yet of when George will return, the Thunder could ill afford a loss Sunday.
They needed the kind of heroics Westbrook has made common in his career but that had been largely absent this year.
On a night when Westbrook didn’t have it, he found it. Just in time.
“I don’t know any team that’s held a trophy at the end of the year — whether it be high school, college or the NBA — that said, ‘Boy, it was just smooth sailing. It was really, really easy. We had no adversity. There was no challenges. Everything just went perfectly,’” Donovan said. “It never happens that way. That’s what makes Russell what he is, is because when adversity hits or when things are not going well or he is not performing or shooting the ball well, he has an incredible ability to re-focus and center himself on the next possession.”
(Photo of Russell Westbrook: Alonzo Adams / USA Today Sports)