Becoming league MVP is the highest individual honor you can achieve as an NBA player. It’s virtually guaranteed to land you a spot in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Apparently, it isn’t enough to guarantee that you won’t be given the lowest stats in NBA 2K23.
One such NBA MVP holds an abysmal title in NBA 2K23: having the lowest Shot IQ rating in the entire game. We are of course talking of Russell Westbrook, who can’t seem to catch a break since joining the Los Angeles Lakers.
Westbrook is given the lowest possible Shot IQ rating in NBA 2K23, a paltry 25. Westbrook is also a volume shooter, which is the worst possible combination and makes him a nightmare to play with when he’s AI-controlled.
Weirdly enough, his mid-range and three-point shots can justifiably be viewed as too high, perhaps in the developer’s attempt to compensate for the extremely low IQ. Westbrook’s mid-range stat is 74, and his threes are rated at 72, which is rather high for someone who’s shot more than 33 percent from three once in his entire career, and was never a reliable mid-range shooter.
The athletic guard wowed the world in the 2016-17 season. He was awarded the league MVP after finishing the year with a triple-double average, a feat that hadn’t been accomplished since the 1960s. Westbrook went into Superman mode after that initial breakthrough, ending three more seasons with a triple-double average.
Despite this historic stretch, Westbrook has been the target of heavy criticism throughout his career. Those criticisms have seemingly escalated to previously unseen heights ever since he joined forces with LeBron James on the Lakers last season.
Many questioned the on-court chemistry between the two, and after the Lakers missed out on the playoffs in their first year together, the naysayers were definitively proven right. The Lakers’ poor performances and Russell Westbrook’s individual struggles were more than enough to convince Ronnie2K and co. that the former MVP is way past his glory days.
It may feel too harsh to give him the lowest Shot IQ in NBA 2K23, but reality is more reasonable than feelings. The Los Angeles Lakers are 0–3 on the new NBA season with Westbrook shooting 29 percent from the floor, and eight percent from the three-point line. A 25 Shot IQ rating doesn’t look that unreasonable when staring at those numbers.
