Russ puts NBA on notice: Pairing with Harden will 'be scary - not for us'

It's been seven years since Russell Westbrook was James Harden's teammate, but he's already putting the rest of the league on notice.

"It's going to be scary, that's all I can tell you," Westbrook said during the Houston Rockets' media day Friday, according to ESPN's Tim MacMahon. "It's going to be scary - not for us."

There have been concerns regarding the pairing of two ball-dominant guards following Houston's offseason acquisition of Westbrook, but head coach Mike D'Antoni doesn't seem too worried.

"It'll work itself out," he said. "You try not to overcoach it. We need Russell to be Russell. We don't want to change him. He's an MVP. That's who we need. We need his bravura to be Russell. That's good enough."

D'Antoni plans to stagger Westbrook and Harden's minutes - just as he did with Chris Paul - in order to afford each player ample time to operate without the other.

Harden, for his part, is confident he'll be able to coexist with Westbrook, even when both are on the floor. The 2018 MVP is one of the game's most lethal scorers but said he won't hesitate to defer to Westbrook if the latter has the hot hand, believing his co-star will reciprocate.

"If Russ got it going and Russ is having one of those games that we've all seen before, guess what I'm going to do: Sit back and watch the show, and vice versa," Harden said. "It's just a part of basketball. So you can't sit up here and say, 'Oh, Russ is going to have the ball for the first half and I'm going to have the ball the second half.'

"No, things happen through the course of the game that you just flow with and go with."