Nyk4lyfe wrote:I call BS.
Here's the thing though: When you have so many more titles than anyone else, what does the specific number matter? Russell sure as heck didn't play until '69 because he wanted 11 rings after all.
And consider the toll that repeating as title winners has had on more recent dynasties. You can see that after each season the team seems to lose steam. That's the true difference between Russell's Celtics and later teams: They were just doing their thing each year, trying to do the best they can.
I think it's also worth noting with regards to Russell how much specific meaning their was in his later years. '67 gave him the added challenge of coaching. '68 gave him the added goal of taking the title back from Wilt. '69 saw he and his boys taking on the world's first superteam. Consider then which was more important in that final year:
1) Winning his Nth title.
or
2) Beating the superteam.
The answer I think is clear.
Even then in Russell's retirement letter he talk about how it all seemed so repetitive at this point, and so he was leaving the game despite the fact he had 1 more year on his contract.
If you want to quibble with the boredom and say he recognized that he might not be able to win the next year, okay, but even if you want to say he wanted to win as long as he could, can you really believe he was thinking "if I can just get to 11" as he decided to play in '68 for another year?
To be clear, I'm not necessarily saying that Russell was some fundamentally unique animal here in how he looked at things. I think much of this stems from him coming around relatively early in the NBA's history and having success so far off the charts team-wise. This causes him to think less about his ring count just as modern players think more about their own ring count and find ways to ignore HIS ring count. Beyond a certain point we're talking about qualitative differences rather than quantitative.
