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.

“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.