Patrick Beverley showed up to Los Angeles Lakers media day armed with a story to tell. When he sat down with Spectrum SportsNet, he knew the questions about his relationship with Russell Westbrook would be coming, and he knew Lakers fans would be watching and listening.
Beverley told a story about Westbrook setting Beverley’s sister up with courtside tickets for a game when Westbrook’s Houston Rockets faced Beverley’s Clippers.
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“This is a story he hasn’t told, I haven’t told,” Beverley said. “Next play, I go to him during the game at the free throw line and say, ‘You know what, that’s real you did that.’ … If I was to name a best friend, so far I’ve been on the team four weeks, three weeks, whatever, but if I was to name a best friend, it would easily be him. Easily.”
The disbelief was understandable. This has been one of the NBA’s most cutthroat beefs for years. Now here they were, teammates in a soap operatic union on the league’s glitziest team.
For those familiar with how Beverley navigates a locker room, with how he identifies the potholes on the path to team success and figures out which ones need to be filled and which ones just need to be avoided, how he kills some teammates with kindness and kicks others in the ass, it was vintage Pat Bev. He knows everyone expects the forced marriage with Westbrook to crash and burn in spectacular fashion. He knows the drama-obsessed NBA gossip machine processed the trade last month that moved Beverley from the Utah Jazz to the Lakers and was certain that it spelled the end of Westbrook in L.A.
So when Beverley told the story, it had a purpose. The message was sent. This will not be an issue on his watch. And if that seems disingenuous, it is anything but when it comes from Beverley, who abides by the George Costanza credo that “it’s not a lie, if you believe it.”
Westbrook famously once said that “Pat Bev tricked y’all,” in reference to the defensive prowess Beverley espouses. But when it comes to locker room dynamics, leadership and accountability, Beverley doesn’t trick anyone. He convinces them. And that goes for himself as well.
Westbrook may indeed be on his way out of Lakerland at some point this season. But if he is moved, it will be because of his regression as a player, the Lakers needing more shooting or defense as a team or his inability to adapt to the role they need from him at this point in his career. It will not be because Beverley couldn’t coexist with him in the locker room.
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Beverley has been called many things over the course of his career. Intense, agitating, bombastic and, yes, crazy. Watching him navigate a season in Minnesota last year in which he all but transfixed a young team with a long history of losing, another word comes to mind to describe how Beverley asserts himself in a locker room and an organization.
Pat Bev is cunning. It’s a loaded word that often implies underhandedness or deception toward a selfish end, but that’s not how it applies to Beverley. When he arrives in a new NBA city, Beverley examines the roster, the staff, the fans, everything. He understands the narratives that each team faces, for better or worse. And then he looks for ways to connect with those on the team, because he knows that the only way to push them as hard as he wants to push them is for them to believe it comes with the aim of propelling the team, not himself, forward.
Later in that interview with Spectrum, Beverley spoke about how his new teammates Westbrook, LeBron James and Anthony Davis have the MVPs, the All-NBAs and, in James’ and Davis’ cases, the championships to validate their careers. Beverley isn’t that kind of star. He has made an All-Defense team three times in his 10 NBA seasons, but that’s it for individual accolades.
What sets him apart, he has said on numerous occasions, is that his teams have made the playoffs in every season of his career. Oh, you want to challenge him on that and mention that the 2017-18 LA Clippers finished in 10th place in the Western Conference? Child, please. Everyone knows that doesn’t count because Pat Bev only played 11 games due to injury.
How big of a deal is that? Ask the Minnesota Timberwolves. At his introductory press conference last season, Beverley promised to bring the Wolves back to the postseason for just the second time since 2004. The eyebrows that raised in the crowd were lowered during a thrilling renaissance season for the Wolves, and Beverley deserves much of the credit for instilling some intensity and commitment to a young team that was so used to losing.
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“Y’all looked at me like I was crazy when I first said that,” Beverley said after the Wolves beat the Clippers in the Play-In game. “I f—ing told y’all.”
The young Wolves gravitated to Beverley early because he understood what they needed to hear and how they needed to hear it. He knew that Karl-Anthony Towns had been burned by veterans before who came in and wanted to impose their will. Beverley didn’t do that. He demanded things of Towns, but he nurtured him early as well, getting his back publicly every chance he could.
“He’s not one of those guys that fights back. You tell him something once. He just says, ‘OK, I’m gonna be dominant’ and literally goes out there and does it,” Beverley said after a fiery win over Westbrook and the Lakers in March.
“I thought my biggest task when I came here was going to be KAT and it’s not. It’s been great. Man, of course you hear all those stories about different players before you meet them. Guys, they tell me this, they tell me that about KAT and just seeing him up personal, it’s totally the opposite of everything I’ve heard.”
With Anthony Edwards, Beverley acted as a hard-nosed family member, filling the shoes of the departed Ricky Rubio as a mentor and telling Edwards the whole way that this league can be his one day.
“He’s like my big brother,” Edwards told reporters in Las Vegas last week after the Wolves beat the Lakers in a preseason game. “I love Pat.”
Beverley took that approach because for all of the bravado and braggadocio that is part of his game, and for all that Towns and Edwards had to learn, Beverley knew he needed the younger stars as much as they needed him. Yes, there were heated exchanges in practice. Yes, he could lord over film sessions. Yes, there were times Beverley got too wound up on the court and took costly technicals or turned matchups a little too personal. But that edge that the Timberwolves played with last season emanated from him. He gave these pups the license to puff their chests and yap back, and they flourished in part because of it.
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“I personally owe him a lot … The biggest thing he did, he came here from Day 1 and told a young team they could make the playoffs,” Wolves coach Chris Finch said last week. “And they believed him, and they followed him.”
Naz Reid, Taurean Prince and Towns have all said they are carrying the lessons they learned from Beverley into this highly-anticipated season. Austin Rivers, who signed this summer, said you could even feel Beverley’s impact after he was gone. There are longstanding members of the Timberwolves organization who put Beverley’s name in the same category as the hallowed Kevin Garnett when it comes understanding and implementing the unyielding mentality that it takes to grind through an 82-game regular season and drag a team into the playoffs.
Just like he knew what the novice Timberwolves needed from him to rise out of the Western Conference basement, he knows what the veteran-laden Lakers need from him. He played with James Harden in Houston and Paul George and Kawhi Leonard with the Clippers, so he knows how to play alongside established superstars. He knows the Lakers were a mess last season, a team that gave in too easily when games were slipping away, that had little to no second-effort intensity and looked too often like they were playing out of obligation and nothing else.
And he knows that everyone is going to be watching how he and Westbrook interact. It wasn’t that long ago that Beverley relished playing for the Clippers and living in the Lakers’ shadow, all the more reason to have a gigantic chip on his shoulder. It was even more recent that he was in Minnesota, leading a merciless Wolves trash-talking charge aimed directly at Westbrook, calling him “trash” and mocking his errant shooting.
He knows that there is a certain delight being taken in segments of the league at the Lakers’ fall from grace and, in particular, Westbrook’s decline. Now the league’s ultimate scrapper has gone Hollywood. He is wearing the purple and gold, playing for maybe the most glamorous franchise in North American sports and alongside James, Davis and Westbrook.
As mad as James clearly became at the Wolves’ antics in that loss last March, he couldn’t help but smile on the several occasions that Beverley patted him on the butt, chirped a little in his ear and brought the fight to him. James has always had an affinity for the players who made something out of nothing, especially the ones who understand where they fit in within the team construct.
Beverley is one of those players. In the press conference after that Lakers win last season, Westbrook told reporters that he wasn’t bothered by the trash talk because the Timberwolves had “never done anything in this league.” Beverley was asked to respond to those comments, and he offered up a verbal bouquet for Westbrook, saying he was one of the few players in the league that caused him to go to bed early the night before facing him so he would be well rested.
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As he exited the interview room, Beverley muttered under his breath that he wasn’t going to be baited into a verbal back-and-forth by the reporters in the room. He knew what everyone was looking for, and he refused to oblige. He knows all the angles. The restraint may have been short-lived, but who is keeping score? Beverley is, of course.
Playoffs every year. 2 western conference finals with 2 different Teams👀👀👀 individual stats or team stats? I thought it was a team sport?? https://t.co/wlPhFB9alQ
— Patrick Beverley (@patbev21) March 17, 2022
Now that he is with the Lakers, he can feel everyone watching with bated breath, waiting for the first big blowup between two of the most stubborn players in the league. The only way he will keep his cherished playoff streak going is if he finds a way to bury the hatchet, connect with Westbrook and bring together a team that appeared so disjointed last season.
It may not work out for Westbrook in Los Angeles. The Lakers may collapse under the weight of his contract and his refusal to adapt. But if that happens, it won’t be because Beverley can’t get over some old rivalry. He has made it 11 years in the NBA, has made over $65 million and keeps finding a way into the playoffs because he knows what to do and what not to do.
He can be surly. He can be loud. He can be confrontational. But Pat Bev can also be very convincing. Right now it is clear that he has convinced himself that the best chance the Lakers have in this hellacious Western Conference is to find a harmony and cohesion that hasn’t been there. A major step in that direction is to squash one of the league’s most contentious beefs, so that is exactly what he is doing. Once he makes up his own mind, he can usually get his teammates to follow.
(Photo of Patrick Beverley and Russell Westbrook: Jeff Bottari / NBAE via Getty Images)
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