Doctor MJ wrote:Quick check in
Great stuff in both sides about Kareem. Glad to see RPOY stuff revisited.
I feel like though people are struggling with putting themselves in the moment when trying to understand the Celtics' run.
The bottom line is that nothing is inevitable. You win 11 titles one at a time and every time opponents are adapting to to you. Which is why it never happens...we'll obviously almost never. But nothing close to it happened earlier in basketball history like this, nor really in other major team sports
When people point out the issues with Wilt's supporting casts decades after the fact they should think about what super teams have often looked like in later eras. bottom line is it's just tough to really make use of all the talent you have in your roster and people tended to expect more then than was feasible just as they do now
11 titles was a shock to people at the time in a way that people viewing the history miss. The Celtics weren't supposed to keep winning once Wilt arrived. Then they weren't supposed to keep winning when Cousy retired. Then they were dead once Wilt went back to Philly. Then theywere really dead once Wilt won one. Then they were dead dead dead once Wilt joined the Lakers.
If you analyze that time period without seeing the Celtics continued success as mind-blowing then you just not really seeing how it was. You need to stop looking at it as a historical incident and instead try to grok how something like that could actually come to be.
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This has come up before, but I think the 1960's Celtics won 11 titles because they were so much better than everyone else that their margin of error -- i.e. their effect of luck -- was great. The Celtics could withstand a 20% drop in play that
coincided with a 20% increase from an opponent because they were already lapping them.
Now, how were they so dominant?
Because Bill Russell was so dominant.Obviously, people differ on how dominant. That's fair and perhaps the crux of the issue between GOAT and 3rd or 6th after a decade of +5 play vs. a decade of +8 play. But consider that the environment in the 9-team league was much more closely packed together than we see today. The standard deviations were smaller and the range among non-Celtics team much more compressed. Moving the needle 5 points was outstanding. West, Wilt, and yes Oscar were studs if they could take a -3 and make them a +3. (e.g. in 1963 West missed 25 games and LA was -2.1. With him they were 7.6 points better that year.)
From 1958-1969 Bill Russell missed 25 games where the opponent and Celtics were otherwise full strength.
In those games, Boston was a -2.3 SRS team. In the other 943 games, they were +6.1. You don't need to believe that the sample perfectly captures Russell's value to see that there is some level of outlier-ness happening that gave Boston a
freakish advantage over the entire league. Although you would have to think that that sample
really undersold Boston's supporting cast to not think that Russell was catapulting a team to places no one else could take teams at the time.
What would the league have looked like without the Celtics? I did this once for the 60's, and here's what we see:
From 1960-1963, no team has an MOV above 4.8. There is typically a team around -6 or -7 -- that's the range of the other teams.
In 1964, the Warriors and Royals would be the first teams over +5, at +6.1 and +5.9 MOV respectively.
There wouldn't be another team over +5 until the 1967 76ers (+10.4).
The Celtics were regularly in the 7's, and even over 8 SRS in 1962. Boston was creating more separation between the 2nd-best teams than the 2nd-best teams sometimes had between the middling teams. This is astounding.
What's so compelling about Doc's line of thinking here is that he's saying look, in no major sports, before or since, have we seen this dominance, and it's primarily traced to the presence of one guy. We rationalize 11 titles like it's just expected, but they lapped the field for the better part of a decade. We rationalize the lapping by saying it's a weak league, but no one did it before or in other sports, and that weak league featured loaded teams at the end of the decade that Celtics STILL went back-to-back on at the end of an era. We laud Hakeem for winning back-to-back in his prime (against a weakish league IMO)...Russell's C's were so dominant that it's like a footnote for them.
Finally, I'll close with my favorite Russell stat. It's about Wilt Chamberlain, fittingly. In 1962, Wilt Chamberlain played Russell 10 time and everyone else 70 times. His team's MOV against the league was +5.0. Against Boston it was -12.0.
1962 Wilt v. League: 51.9 ppg - 13.1 FTA/36 - 54.1% TS%
1962 Wilt v Boston: 39.7 ppg - 9.6 FTA/36 - 48.3% TS%
(In their 7-game playoff series, he average 33.6.)
