HOUSTON — Russell Westbrook looked so strange in red.
The Houston Rockets’ newest star was sitting in a baseline folding chair before practice Friday, tidying up his new digs just as coach Mike D’Antoni, James Harden and the rest of their “One Mission” crew was about to take the court and figure out what had gone wrong in the season-opening loss to Milwaukee the night before. Now I’ve covered Russ for a long time, back to those early Oklahoma City days when — as a 21-year-old who was straight out of UCLA — he and a much-younger Kevin Durant were putting a scare into Kobe Bryant’s Lakers during that 2010 first-round playoff series. Harden, of course, was the super sixth man on that squad.
The Thunder lost that series in six games, prompting Bryant to show his respect afterward when he told the dynamic duo that they were “a couple of bad …” (expletive; the New York Times recap was G-rated).
So to see Westbrook in anything other than…
