Vote: Bill RussellSo I'll say up front that I expect Michael Jordan to take the #1 spot again, and that really doesn't bother me in the slightest. He's an excellent candidate. I do consider Russell's case a bit stronger though, and I intend to speak to that in this thread more to do my best that everyone gets why he's so impressive in general.
Since though people have already said a lot of great stuff (awesome to see such heavy hitting, great start to the project), it doesn't really seem that beneficial to lay it out like a blog post that assumes people know nothing. Key points for me then:
1. Analysis of Russell's GOAT candidacy starts for most of us by comparing him to Wilt Chamberlain. Most in the world see Wilt as the more impressive of the two, and I used to as well. Most here seem sold on Russell over Wilt so I won't belabor the point other than to emphasize that this is a really big deal. While most of you know that I have some pretty chippy criticisms of Wilt, his physical talent would be an outlier in any era, so besting him proves quite a lot.
2. People often see Russell's size as an issue. I point out how he handled Wilt as something to reassure them. I'll also point out though that there's no real reason to be terribly concerned with Russell's size based on what we see in today's game. The best defenders are always interior help defenders, and that requires length, quickness, and intelligence. I would submit Russell should be given the edge in intelligence over any similar player in the history of the NBA (we can talk about Larry Bird, etc, but he's a different type of player obviously), that people should be very careful about giving any other big a quickness edge over Russell, and that realistically there are diminishing turns relating to length once you get past a certain point.
I still look at Russell as clear cut the archetype for how you'd build a defender today, in other words.
3. Once I got past Russell vs Wilt, I started thinking about Russell vs Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. For a good while I favored Kareem based on a perception of two-way impact and longevity.
The longevity thing is actually a pretty trite argument for me though at this point. When we talk about players who played what they considered a complete career, we don't really have any reason to think they couldn't have kept on contributing value to their team if there'd been an urge to do so. Russell won 11 titles, it's surely a complete career.
What about the two-way impact? Two things to think about:
1) Remember those years smack dab in Kareem's prime where his teams did nothing special.
2) Understand how drastically off the charts Boston's defense was when Russell was at his apex.
I look at these things, and I give Russell the impact edge despite Kareem's clear edge on offense, and really this is what roughly holds true for me about Russell vs other in general. In other words, don't reply to me looking to defend Kareem here, because I'm not knocking Kareem really. The notion that a superstar can always turn any team into a contender is clearly a myth, and people would do well to remember Kareem when they look to knock others.
I'm not claiming that Russell a clear cut exception to this rule, but his impact on opposing defense was like nothing we've seen since.
4. "But could Russell do something like that now?". I'm willing to say I think he'd be less effective today. I think he'd still be the best defender, and I think his offense would shock people with how much better his numbers would look. However, I don't have a problem saying that I'd probably look at LeBron James was the better prospect were they coming out now for this league.
Should that knock Russell out of contention for the top spot? i don't think so. I do not see a GOAT list as something that should simply ask "How would they do now?". Let's take a clearly absurd example of where such thinking would take you:
"Yeah, Lincoln was great during the Civil War, but that doesn't give me any reason to think he'd be great against a financial crisis, and it's not like slavery's an issue any more."
I'm not advocating for Russell based simply on dominance over his era - you have to figure in degree of difficulty as well, and this is why I largely ignore earlier eras this hype up on the GOAT list. Quite frankly, if Russell just dominated in those late 50s-early 60s years, it would be a major issue for me too.
However, Russell kept on dominating. Leagues coming of age follow S-curves, like a growing business does:
The thing is that Russell's career spans the rapid skill growth era. Unprecedented change in that 13 years, and there basically was never any answer for Russell no matter how the change occurred. That's just crazy. Basically, I think it's naive to assume other players could have thrived throughout all these changes like Russell did.
5. The battle of the "perfect" careers: Russell vs Michael Jordan.
I think that in the end, those who put Russell at #2 behind only Jordan, are likely to see Jordan as the 2nd guy with a perfect career, but since he did it in a later - and presumed more competitive era - tie goes to him. This makes sense to me, except that I don't see Jordan's career as the same type of perfection.
If we make a list of most consecutive NBA titles, the list looks like this:
1. Boston 8
2. everyone else 3
I would assert that this distinction should be seen as night & day. I understand that people have a tendency to want to essentially give Jordan a 6-peat, but in both 3-peat it was clear that the Bulls were fading toward the end, and clearly from what we saw in '95 the Bulls don't get back to winning titles without making some personnel adjustments.
Getting into retirements and related issues: Jordan's 3 retirements are a joke. Yes there were unusual circumstances the first time, and yes he'd eventually have to retire a 2nd time as a result. 3 retirements though is a sign of a restless soul, particularly when you look at some of those details - the baseball, the stupidity of his approach to Washington.
In short: What makes Russell truly stand out over Wilt, is also what makes him stand out over Jordan. Russell was a guy who could truly indefinitely just focus on the task at hand and do what needed to be done. He wasn't a guy staring across a fence thinking about the grass being greener...and that's the reason why he could win 8 titles in a row. I'm not going to say he's the only basketball player in history who had the brain to do that...but Jordan wasn't one of those guys.
6. On the "perfect" note, I've seen people also talk about Jordan as "the perfect player". He wasn't. Not saying anyone else was, and I'm not saying he was imperfect because he wasn't the GOAT at everything, I'm saying he has clear myopic limitations.
The issue is simply that first and foremost, Jordan was a volume scorer, and the typical mentality of the volume scorer is to focus on their individual attack rather than the team attack. If you're good enough at your individual attack relative to your teammates and your opponents, that might be good enough for you to be the most valuable offensive player in the world, but to the extent that Jordan is the archetype of this, he's also showed us the limitations here.
Remember the Dream Team where the USA's offense operated in a state of passing ecstasy that would make Pop gasp...except for one man still chucking as hard as he could. Barkley shots 76% TS, the team shoot 64%, Jordan shoots 49%. Everyone got the memo except Jordan, who of course was going around in practice emphasizing "I'm the man now, it's my game, it's my team.". People talk about that like it's impressive, really it displays a fundamental cluelessness about how basketball works. Had the other guys not had such great attitudes (Magic first among them), we might have had something much like an Iverson-Marbury type of team like in 2004.
I get that the huge success of that team makes many think that Jordan would have changed his way if the team were truly struggling, but...we saw how Jordan reacted in Washington. There he came in their already knowing it was unwise of him to try to volume score. That his only purpose was to help other guys come into their own. But he just couldn't help himself. He went back to his old ways despite the fact his skills weren't anywhere near good enough to achieve anything this way, all the way continuing to "lead" with a brutality that as we saw there, was fully capable of simply reducing his teammates into vegetables. It's stupid, plain and simple.
All of that though, while it's the most egregious flaw in his mentality, doesn't actually change very much the direct he had on his NBA career. I think though it's crucial to understand these limitations to appreciate how fortunate Jordan was in the team that got built around him in Chicago.
Remember that before Phil Jackson, Jordan had never led anything beyond a mediocre team offense. While this in and of itself isn't damning - human basketball players have human limitations - it's crucial to understand that it's much more difficult to make a decent offense insanely good than it is to make a bad offense decent. The Bulls were on a plateau until Jackson.
Now, I'm not actually trying to say Jackson deserves all the credit, or that Jordan deserves no credit for adapting to the new scheme, but this was an offense whose major competitive advantage was at least as much offensive rebounding as it was Jordan's scoring. Ponder that while remember how Jordan played on the Dream Team and in Washington.
This type of customized offense architecture is not something that a Magic or a Bird needs in order to make beautiful things happen on offense, nor is it what Russell needed on defense. Jordan was extremely fortunate to finally get into the right situation, or else people might forever question whether his individualist game could truly lead to team excellence, because it sure as heck was no given that it would have happened.
Again, I might be misunderstanding, here.
