RealGM Top 100 List #2

[Doctor MJ]

As I've researched and come to understand Russell it's just clear to me he's one of the true spearheads. That is why he played differently from others from the beginning and why his coaches one after another all looked like innovators.

None if this means you should have to give Russell some kind of extra credit, but with "the Auerbach factor" it sure seems time like the opposite of an extra credit is occurring...And that's crazy!

Question: Is it a coach's job only to innovate? Let it be given that Russell innovated every strategy in the book for his team during the 60s. Let the entirety of the due credit be given to him for that. (In my book, that aspect of his inherent player goodness is accounted for.) Checkmark for Russell. There you go.

Who helped to foster the culture? Who kept things going smoothly? Who "LET" Russell do his thing? Who saw to it that the team was specifically built around Russell, for Russell? Who was it? Even when Auerbach left the team, the decade-long's work of building up that franchise was firmly in place, around Russell, around the cog that was at the center of the team's success. But could anyone just step in and do that for a franchise? Nope.

"Hey Red, I'm a fantastic defender, and I know all the strategies that it takes to win!"
"Win? What do you know about winning? College doesn't count. No, let's do this my way. Get in the post and score."

Either Russell obliges, and does what the coach tells him to do (crappy strategy for winning in that era), or he clashes with Auerbach (lack of team unity). Either way, impact isn't maximized, the same impact that some poster want from players. And then someone doesn't rank Russell as highly because of it. And it would be no fault of Russell's.

I'll say this again. It would be no fault of Russell's.

And no, this isn't "automatic" for every great? Hey Mike, where's your impact like Russell's? Oh, you didn't get the roster to fit you like a glove from day one like Russell? Oh, Jackson and Winters aren't in your corner to put the proper culture in place like Russell? Shame you can't impact your team like Russell did, then. You ain't no Russell, kid.

Impact bias is new winning bias. It is.

Your last line just blew my mind

playing good means doing what you can to impact so "impact bias" to me says "you're biased toward players who really excelelled at playing well". It's nonsense.

Now I get that context exists and I don't ignore it but the ease at which some dismiss the thing that is the players actual job to maximize weirdos me out.

And let me just say I don't mean to knock Red. He's great. It's just that so often when people being up a coach to knock a player they don't seem to me to be able to demonstrate consistent standards in their analyses across other players.


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[Doctor MJ]

None if this means you should have to give Russell some kind of extra credit, but with "the Auerbach factor" it sure seems time like the opposite of an extra credit is occurring...And that's crazy!

Get ready for when we discuss Duncan which is really really soon. The "Pop factor" may be worse.

When we have plenty of evidence that shows Russell was already doing his thing, taking credit away from him to give it to Red for simply being smart enough not to mess with what Russell was already doing really doesnt make any sense.

Ah we'll see I'm going to come off very different when it comes to Duncan, as I would with Russell if his last titles came due to a great team offense that didn't seem very dependent on him.

Not saying I don't rate
Duncan highly because I do and I expect him to leap up over some on my list this time, but any one poised to promote Duncan up based on updated ring counting actually does need a Pop factor added to their thinking among other things.


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[Warspite]

Since there's obviously not going to be any further discussion, reading through the discussions I thought I'd pose this question.

I don't have interest in a GOAT list, but one thing I've been pondering is GOAT ranges. After reading the arguments in this project, I think I'm going to add GOAT ranges to my notes. I'm still sticking to my initial prediction that Kareem gets the second spot, so I'll start with Russell.

To be honest, sometimes I wonder if Garnett (and Duncan) were better than Russell, too. The shot-blocking and defensive rebounding are the things that hold me back some.

So to the anti-Russell contingent, where, in your mind, is Russell's floor? Just sticking to big men for the moment, Kareem, Shaq, Hakeem, Duncan, Garnett are over him, Wilt, Robinson, Ewing, I imagine? Howard I've seen? Is Mourning better? Which all-time big men are over him, and where does he fall? I imagine he would be below any big man who could play defense and has scored 20 in a season. I imagine prime Walton as well—Bob Ryan said prime Walton was better than Russell, but he didn't play long enough. Since some have of the participants him as GOAT, I'm interested in the lowest range. (Some say he'd be lucky to be a bench player today, but I'm not interested in that.)

Second question, for a big man who wasn't "two-way," how good of a scorer do they have to be to be better than Russell if they weren't an elite defender? For elite defenders, even if they weren't as good as Russell, the offense puts them over the top, but where Russell is clearly ahead, how good do they have to be offensively? Dirk would be a given. Who else? Barkley? People don't seem to like him because of his defense, but would his offense win out? Since nothing's going on, I thought this would be an opportunity to get some feedback.

If offense is so important then Bob McAdoo might be better than Russell. I would imagine for the pro offense crowd his MVP yr is better than any of the KG,Hakeem crowd. In the end we know that this is ageism. If KG played in the 60s and put up those stats and W/Ls he wouldnt be in the top 100.

[Texas Chuck]

Who said anything about updated ring counting?

I don't think his play the last 2 years is irrelevant tho by any means. Hard to put all their success on teh offensive end as well when they've been top 3 defenses the last 2 years. Even if you give Duncan no credit offensively, he's certainly still a big part of the defense.

But ignoring his post-prime years we are still going to hear all about Pop and the organization. And sure those are factors in his team success, but I'd hate to him not receive the credit for his own individual play.

[An Unbiased Fan]

If offense is so important then Bob McAdoo might be better than Russell. I would imagine for the pro offense crowd his MVP yr is better than any of the KG,Hakeem crowd. In the end we know that this is ageism. If KG played in the 60s and put up those stats and W/Ls he wouldnt be in the top 100.

I'd put McAdoo around a 7-8 on offensive. Great volume scorer for a few years, but the span wasn't that long, and he wasn't much of playmaker. Defensively he's maybe a 3, I know his rep for defense was weak, but maybe someone knows more about how weak it was.

For me, Russell is a 4-5 in offensive impact, and a 9(10 in his era) on defense. So he's still a far superior player to McAdoo. Plus I think Russell was the GOAT team leader, and had amazing consistently from start to finish. His intangibles may push him to my #3 pick, since everyone up for a vote has flaws of their own too.

[ElGee]

realbig3's points have been making me think of something that I don't think I've seen brought up a lot.

Let's say you think Russell's peak defensive impact is worth 7 points. Even 8. And you look around the landscape today and don't see anybody over 4 or 5 on defense alone. (Personally, this is in line with my evaluations.) Consider that this is per game. And Russell's teams played a lot of possessions. Like, 20-25% more than we see today. Which means, on a per-possession basis, Russell would really be closer to a +6 today.

I've been meaning to ask you about this.

Where do you put Russell offensively in that case? Compared to say, Kevin Garnett?

If Garnett (who had a very long prime and has plenty of sub-prime years where he's still an elite player) is a +5 on defense during his prime, and Russell in comparable circumstances is a +6...how do you rate each of them offensively? Also, how do you feel about the fact that Garnett wasn't afforded the chance to conserve energy on offense and focus most of his energy on defense until he got to Boston (and during his 2nd year in Boston, he gets injured and never quite gets back to his old form, so he didn't really get to spend more than a year of his physical prime focusing most of his talent on defense), while Russell had a stable supporting cast and coach that allowed him to do that pretty much his whole career?

So a 5 SRS in 1962 in not the same as a 5 SRS in 1972 or 1992. I can't emphasize this enough. I feel like I've said this a few times but it's critical when you look at how much a player moved the needle in the past. If you look at the top-100 teams by SRS z-score and then break them out into time periods, you'll see how different creating separation from the league can be:



Teams around 1.7 deviations from the mean produce different SRS's depending on the era. And no, I don't think Russell could have the same defensive impact in 2010, but for his era, his defensive impact (even as "low" as +5 or +6) was earth-shattering.

I'll also add, in contrast to a lot of what has been suggested in this thread, that Russell did not play in a perfect situation. I don't see a team that wouldn't benefit from his defense. That's the cool thing about it (and many other players in history with great portability) -- the exertion of his goodness felt as situational impact applies to just about every team in his decade. He's a game-changer. (Offense is more complex and about sharing the ball, shot distributions, spacing, etc. and thus we're more likely to see bad fits and good fits even among some very good players.)

I'm incredulous that people think Russell had the perfect situation -- they seem to base this claim on Red's GMing which overlooks how Russell exerted on-court impact. He may have had the best team-builder/franchise in Red/Boston which created stability for 13 years and helped win 11 rings, but based on his game where would Russell no unleash defensive hell? It would take an EXTREME situation for a coach to say "go in the post and be a high-volume scorer and don't defend! No shot-blocking! Use energy on offense and rest on defense!"

He dominated in college.
He dominated in the Olympics.
He dominated in the pros.

Obviously, the debate here is about the degree of the last claim. What I'm saying is you don't have to look at the +9 MOV's or -11 (!) defense in 1964 and give all of that credit to Russell. You can say "damn, Russell's on a good team. They would be around .500 or even better without him" -- which is VERY good for a supporting cast in any era (supporting casts are typically not positive-performing teams). You can say he had defensive players to enhance the teams D, and I would completely agree (Sanders is underrated there IMO, Hondo slightly overrated). None of those things preclude him from having GOAT-level impact (think standard deviations) from 1957-1969. Or, said another way, if you removed Russell, what do you think would happen to Boston's title odds each year?

PS Offensively, I see Russell around neutral impact. Well above replace-players but not moving the needle really. I have years where I rate him as a slight negative. If you are a cross-generational comparer, I 100% agree this is an issue. I just don't think any of the cross-generational comparers have answered the basic problems of that method - -namely, how do you cross-generationally account for longevity? Russell's OCD about basketball and was a high-impact 35-year old. Do you think he plays 15 years with today's technology? 17? 20?

If we all agree Russell's a basketball genius, and we ignore the epigenetics problem and just pretend he's the same "Bill Russell" born in 1985, do we really think that with his still ahead-of-his-time understanding of the game that he'd take sweeping hook shots from 17 feet? Or is it likely that such a genetic freak is more like a slightly weaker Dwight Howard on offense (probably a better shooter and better passer) or a stronger Tyson Chandler and a multi-time DPOY pushing the boundaries of defensive impact in this era?

I don't know where that lands him on your GOAT list, but I don't understand why some people just "transport" his offensive game from 1962, especially for those who already scale back his defense because of the 3-point line today.

[ThaRegul8r]

If offense is so important then Bob McAdoo might be better than Russell. I would imagine for the pro offense crowd his MVP yr is better than any of the KG,Hakeem crowd. In the end we know that this is ageism. If KG played in the 60s and put up those stats and W/Ls he wouldnt be in the top 100.

I'd put McAdoo around a 7-8 on offensive. Great volume scorer for a few years, but the span wasn't that long, and he wasn't much of playmaker. Defensively he's maybe a 3, I know his rep for defense was weak, but maybe someone knows more about how weak it was.

For me, Russell is a 4-5 in offensive impact, and a 9(10 in his era) on defense. So he's still a far superior player to McAdoo. Plus I think Russell was the GOAT team leader, and had amazing consistently from start to finish. His intangibles may push him to my #3 pick, since everyone up for a vote has flaws of their own too.

McAdoo was one of the players I actually had in mind for the second part of my initial question, but I decided to stay modern. Thank you for your thoughts. What's your opinion on Dirk?

[JordansBulls]

So this did not end in a tie?

[ThaRegul8r]

So this did not end in a tie?

No, as Baller (GilmoreFan it seems) got his desired outcome.

[MisterWestside]

Your last line just blew my mind

playing good means doing what you can to impact so "impact bias" to me says "you're biased toward players who really excelelled at playing well". It's nonsense.

Now I get that context exists and I don't ignore it but the ease at which some dismiss the thing that is the players actual job to maximize weirdos me out.

And let me just say I don't mean to knock Red. He's great. It's just that so often when people being up a coach to knock a player they don't seem to me to be able to demonstrate consistent standards in their analyses across other players.


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Pardon me for ruffling feathers here, but I stand by that line. I don't disagree with this phrase, by the way; it's simply the fact that the many things that must take place for this to occur go beyond what one individual does. Even if the player is working hard to acheive this goal in earnest.

And while ElGee's info helps to normalize the impact numbers, they don't say "Player A's --- SRS lift in era X is equivalent to ___ SRS lift in era Y; therefore, Player A would achieve ___ SRS in era Y". That doesn't follow. I know that he did not make that claim either, and I won't put words into his mouth. But the stark unknown as to Russell's (or any player's) true ability for all-time is what makes this project tricky, interesting, and fun. I think he'd be superb today, and a perennial MVP candidate who fits in among the best defensive players (+6 defense); but there's a difference between being that, and the invincible basketball GOAT who was light-years ahead of everyone else in his era (again: in his era) on defense. If I put him closer to the former than to the latter (which I do), then he's pegged down some spots in the all-time rankings. He stands besides players as opposed to towering above them.

[Gregoire]

.

In comparison, I would say prime MJ was 10/7, Russell was 4/10(for his era), KAJ was 10/7 to start, but 9/6 for most of his prime. Magic is 10/4. Bird is 10/4. Prime Lebron is 9/6, could be 10 offensively if I didn't feel his style of play didn't marginalize others a bit. Peak Shaq was 10/7 maybe even 10/8 for 2000...but for most of his career he was more like 10/5, he had the potential to be GOAT, damn. Prime Kobe was from 10/6 to 10/5 depending on the year. prime Duncan is 6/8, maybe 6/9 for 2002-03. KG is 6/7, maybe 7/7 for 03-05. Wilt's hard to gauge frankly, on both off/def. 94-95 Hakeem was 7/8, and 7/9 in the playoffs.

As you can see, I don't think the margin for the Top players is all that great. Russell falls back a bit in comparison to the other Top 10 guys, as does Magic/Bird for me. But all 3 are still Top 10 caliber HOFers, and they have consistency in their favor too, where as many of the others didn't maintain 15+ scales for most of their careers.

Good method... But I think you overrate Kobe a bit. Howe do you evaluate peak MJ and peak Wilt in this case?