Vote 1: Bill Russell
The Great RivalsAlright, Imma take a bit of a journey here, and I'll give the trigger warning that Wilt Chamberlain will loom large here, and will be criticized. I don't do this because I hate Wilt, but because Wilt was always seen as the GOAT basketball talent, and the standard by which others were judged. Even Russell himself came to be re-defined as a contrast to Wilt in a way that was very different from how he was perceived originally - which I might say could have been called a Goliath-type.
So, I think that probably the most important specific comparison to understand when doing historical basketball GOATs is Russell vs Wilt. We get all sorts of stories past down about this comparison, and all savvy young skeptics find the following point resonant:
It's a team game, so if one star seems to be doing a lot more than the other but his team is losing, maybe it's because it's a TEAM GAME! It doesn't help when you hear arguments that start throwing around words like 'loser' to describe a guy whose teams did a lot more winning than losing. There's no doubt that winning-bias type arguments have been used for forever to argue for Russell over Wilt. Sufficed to say then, when I came to RealGM as a more-informed-than-most basketball fan, I ranked Wilt ahead of Russell.
As I dove deeper into the past however, a few things really shaped my perspective and swung me to the other side:
1. The fact that all through this time period it seems that defensive impact was possible to a considerably greater extent than offensive impact. This is something that by itself might be more of an argument for Russell over Oscar & West than Wilt. Simply put, in a world where offensive impact is more possible than defensive, which is where I think we tend to start by default, there are really good reasons to think that not just Wilt but other players were more deserving of MVPs than Russell.
When you realize that defense truly was king back then, then at least in-era, you lose a lot of that reason to be skeptical about Russell. When you watch a pitcher in baseball or a goalie in hockey seemingly shutdown the opposing offense, you have no qualms about calling that player the MVP of that game even if that guy couldn't be expected to hit homers or skate with grace. And to extent, the data told me that basketball in that era was somewhat analogous.
This alone didn't put Russell ahead of Wilt though, because Wilt was also capable of massive defensive impact, and Wilt was about as good of an offensive player as they come, right? I mean, even if we grant Russell the edge on defense, can it really make up for Wilt scoring 20-30 more points than Russell?
2. The incredible success of the '66-67 76ers, where Wilt was less of a scorer, and yet the team took a massive leap forward on offense.
This is where going through year-by-year and thinking about why the people involved made the decisions they made ended up having a profound impact on me. If Wilt is the greatest scorer of the age, then why would any coach come in and tell Wilt to shoot MUCH less? Well and good to say to say that changing the approach allowed for Wilt to have facilitator's impact on his teammate, but that implies that it was a choice between Shooter Wilt and Passer Wilt, and Passer Wilt was just better (at least for the context in question). From there you actually got people saying Wilt was the GOAT scorer and even better as a passer, which just doesn't make a lot of sense.
At the heart of the issue is that in the end shooting and passing are decisions that a player makes in the moment, and the expectation has always been that a player will need to do both, and thus is on the hook for deciding which move is best each and every moment. And so if a player gets incrementally better players around him, he should be a smidge less likely to shoot and more likely to pass.
So what does it say when a coach comes in and afterward a player becomes MUCH less likely to shoot and MUCH more likely to pass? That it's not really about the change in teammates, but the change to a kind of default setting. A "default setting" that really should be as close to undetectable as possible if you're reacting to what the defense gives you.
And if you're that new coach and you have any sort of common sense at all, you don't do this to any star just for the heck of it, let alone the most celebrated scorer in the history of the sport. You would only do it if you saw a problem and were so confident in what you say that you were willing to risk becoming a laughing stock for all time. And make no mistake, had Alex Hannum's new scheme backfired, that's what he would have been. When you question conventional wisdom and conventional wisdom proves correct, you generally look like a fool. When you do that in your career on something big enough to always be the first thing people remember about you, it's often a career killer.
So then I think the most important question for folks to answer about '66-67, is: What did Hannum see? So long as you take this part very seriously as essential to evaluation of Wilt, I respect others coming to different conclusions.
Way back in the day when I was doing the blogging thing I wrote a post that's probably (hopefully?) still worth reading:
Chamberlain Theory: The Real Price of Anarchy in BasketballWhich led to this general takeaway about basketball:
There is more to judging the effectiveness of a scorer, or a player in general, than simply his most obvious related statistics, and pursuit of those obvious statistics without proper awareness for the rest of the court can erase most if not all of a scorer’s positive impact, even when those obvious statistics are as great as any in all of history.Interestingly as I read this now I think about something I wasn't aware of back then:
Goodhart's LawAny observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.Often paraphrased (and simplified) as
When the measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure.Anyway, getting back to Russell vs Wilt, while previously I had been in a camp that might have said something like "I believe you that Russell had an edge on defense even above Wilt, but I can't fathom it was enough to make up for Wilt's 50 to 18 PPG scoring advantage", that became a lot harder to be skeptical of when I had to admit to myself that I believe that 24 PPG Wilt was actually more effective than 50 PPG Wilt.
Once I got past that statistical hang up, believing that Russell was often more valuable than Wilt seemed actually plausible.
3. I do think something that just needs to be acknowledged is that this notion of winning as many titles as possible to become the GOAT just wasn't the same thing back then, and it really wasn't the same for someone like Wilt who understandably saw basketball as just one source of public success. "Bigger than the game" makes it sound like it's about ego, but in the deeper past top athletes would jump from sport to sport to the movies to the recording studio wherever attention and fortune availed.
In some ways, that's always been true and is true now...but the difference is that someone like LeBron knows that the more he achieves through his years in the NBA, the bigger his reach after he retires. Literally this wasn't even true for Wilt. Winning a title was important...but from there to him it didn't follow that he should milk the success to achieve a dynasty. To him, it made financial sense to get himself to Hollywood. (Noteworthy that LeBron is in Hollywood now too...but he didn't come until after he was convinced he couldn't win more where he was.)
All this to say then that in some ways the entire basis of this project is "unfair" to Wilt in a way that the Peak project is not. He really wasn't trying to "max out" his NBA career the way guys do now, and the NBA-centered nature of this project then ends up effectively penalizing Wilt for this.
This pertains to why I tend to emphasize that there are myriad different ways to rank these guys, and a difference in spot lit criteria in a project such as this can easily lead to one thinking that someone else completely denies the greatness of a guy simply because a particular criteria ends up casting a smaller shadow than another angle would.
Russell on the RegularOkay, let me continue on this point but widen out the gaze a bit:
While Wilt's tendency to stargaze is a completely understandable thing that just happens to penalize him under Career Achievement criteria, there is also the matter that it's really, really hard to keep beating all comers again and again and again the way Russell and the Celtics did. There's a certain joy in repetition that you need from this. It's not about winning the 11th title, it's about the process of proving yourself every day. It's about self-discipline, and in a team sport, working well with teammates on and off the court. If you don't have all those things, you're either going to run out of gas a lot sooner, or you're going to rip yourselves apart.
While I'm not going to say that Bill Russell is the only player with the mindset who could have put his team on his back to the top so regularly for so long, I think it speaks to a powerful capability where we all exist on a spectrum of greater and lesser ability to do it. I see many, many other stars who I think clearly don't have what it takes, and frankly I don't think I could have done it had I had Russell's body. I think it's important to recognize that this in and of itself is part of what makes Russell so special.
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Russell the Defensive ArchetypeAlright, so far I've alluded to Russell's defensive greatness but I haven't really drilled down. I'm going to point to another blog post I wrote, this at the end of that experiment:
Searching for Bill Russell ~ Starring Anthony Davis (2012)The context here was my excitement over Anthony Davis as a prospect, which makes it interesting to look back on in its own right, but I bring it up here for the same reason why I was focused on finding a new Russell at the time: I see Russell as essentially the ideal build for a defensive player.
As stunningly agile as he was for his size, Chamberlain still could not compare with Russell in this regard. He had various clear advantages to Russell (strength, and likely fine motor skills come to mind), but the agility gap meant that there were simply things Russell could do than Chamberlain couldn’t. From Bill Russell: A Biography:
Bill understood that Wilt’s game was more vertical, that is, from the floor to the basket. Wilt’s game was one of strength and power…Bill’s game was built on finesse and speed, what he called a horizontal game, as he moved back and forth across the court blocking shots, running the floor, and playing team defense.
Russell’s quickness, along with instincts and superb leaping ability, meant that Russell could cast a larger shadow on the defensive side of the court. He could run out to challenge perimeter shooting, and recover quickly enough that he wouldn’t let his team get burned. That ability to have more global impact, and his sense to use it wisely, made him a more valuable defensive player than Chamberlain could ever be.
That you'd want length has always been a thing that's clear in basketball, but it's not necessarily obvious that a more lithe frame is better than a thicker one. Strength has its advantages too after all, and if basketball were a merely one-on-one sport where one guy just backed the other guy down, thicker would be better.
But it's a team game on an open field. It's a game of horizontal space, as is alluded to in the quote, and that's where Russell's unique combination of strengths gave him immense benefit.
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Russell the RevolutionaryNow, this is a project that isn't about things like influence, and so a player being a spearhead doesn't necessarily help his case. Nonetheless, I think it's important to understand how Russell became what he became.
Russell was not a star in high school. Not because of an ultra-late growth spurt. Not because of racism. Why? A few things:
First, he played at California-state-champion type high school (McClymonds). There was extreme talent on the team, and as a result Russell didn't come of age with everything built toward making use of him. He came of age fitting in with other talents.
But I don't mean to imply that Russell was the secret MVP of those high school team with his teammates getting all the scoring glory. There's absolutely nothing to indicate that he was THAT good at the time, and when Russell describes his journey, he makes clear that the place where he really found his way in basketball was not in high school, but on a traveling all-star team he happened to join after high school.
Why do I say "happened"? As he describes it, the traveling all-star team was launched in the middle of the school year, but because Russell was a "splitter" who graduated on an earlier track, and he was the only senior on the team for whom this is true, when the all-star team came looking to add a McClymonds player to their roster, Russell was the only choice available.
And so it happened that Russell ended up spending months after his high school career riding on a bus from town to town playing basketball without any active coaching, and something funny occurred:
From
"Second Wind" by Bill RussellWithin a week after the All-Star tour began, something happened that opened my eyes and chilled my spine…Every time one of them would make one of the moves I liked, I’d close my eyes just afterward and try to see the play in my mind. In other words, I’d try to create an instant replay on the inside of my eyelids.
“On this particular night I was working on replays of many plays, including McKelvey’s way of taking an offensive rebound and moving quickly to the hoop. It’s a fairly simple play for any big man in basketball, but I didn’t execute it well and McKelvey did. Since I had an accurate version of his technique in my head, I started playing with the image right there on the bench, running back the picture several times and each time inserting a part of me for McKelvey. Finally I saw myself making the whole move, and I ran this over and over, too. When I went into the game, I grabbed an offensive rebound and put it in the basket just the way McKelvey did. It seemed natural, almost as if I were just stepping into a film and following the signs.”
“For the rest of the trip I was nearly possessed by basketball. I was having so much fun that I was sorry to see each day end, and I wanted the nights to race by so that the next day could start. The long rides on the bus never bothered me. I talked basketball incessantly, and when I wasn’t talking I was sitting there with my eyes closed, watching plays in my head. I was in my own private basketball laboratory, making blueprints for myself.
Russell began this process of watching basketball in his head as an active participant, and soon began focusing less on trying to do what he saw other guys do, and instead how to defend against those guys. And then he started revolutionizing basketball right there with his eyes closed - not that he knew that then - what he knew is that he came back from the tour a much, much better basketball player.
Now, before we buy in entirely to the idea that Russell was a scrub in high school, I mean, the man did get a scholarship offer to play for the University of San Francisco (USF). Not a powerhouse program, but that doesn't mean they just hand out scholarships to anybody. Russell says that the USF scout had happened to see him play a particularly good game in high school, I'll let you decide how much of this is false modesty.
The cool thing though at USF is that since freshman couldn't play on the Varsity team, he basically got another year developing before having to fit in with stars under a coach. And in that year, he met KC Jones, and the two of them basically went Einstein on the game:
“We decided that basketball is basically a game of geometry –of lines, points and distances–and that the horizontal distances are more important than the vertical ones.”
“KC and I spent hours exploring the geometry of basketball, often losing track of the time. Neither of us needed a blackboard to see the play the other was describing…It was as if I was back on the Greyhound, assembling pictures of moves in my mind, except that KC liked to talk about what combinations of players could do. I had been daydreaming about solo moves, but he liked to work out strategies. KC has an original basketball mind, and he taught me how to scheme to make things happen on the court, particularly on defense…He was always figuring out ways to make the opponent take the shot he wanted him to take when he wanted him to take it, from the place he wanted the man to shoot.”
“Gradually, KC and I created a little basketball world of our own. Other players were lost in our conversations because we used so much shorthand that no one could follow what we were saying. Most of the players weren’t interested in strategy anyway.”
The pair would soon take the college basketball world by storm, and take USF to the big time and back-to-back NCAA championships.
I'd note here in Russell you have an example of someone with an incredibly active basketball imagination once it got turned on - which of course didn't happen until he had time AWAY from coaches - but it's not that I'm saying that his talent on this front was one-of-a-kind and that that was his truly greatest strength. Russell was unusual in such talent surely, but really it was him getting into certain types strategic habits with the reinforcement of a similar mind that caused something of an exponential curve. And of course, the application of that curve was on Russell's body, which was a far greater body talent than what Jones possessed.
I also think Russell elaborate on the horizontal game tellingly in this quote but unfortunately I'm not sure which book it was from:
Beginning in my freshman year, I developed the concept of horizontal and vertical games. I made a distinction between the two that others had not done. The horizontal game meant how I played side to side. The vertical game was how I played up and down. I knew that if I could integrate the two games, our team could win. I would always be in a position to determine where the ball was and where it was going.
What I saw was how much more there was to the game than that. I would lie awake at night and play with numbers. How much time was there in an NBA game? Forty-eight minutes. How many shots were taken in a game? Maybe a hundred and sixty, eighty or so on each side. I calculated the number of seconds each shot took—a second, a second and a half—and then I multiplied by a hundred. Two hundred forty seconds at most—or four minutes. Then add a single extra second for a foul shot missed and then the ball put in play; add another minute at the most. So, five minutes out of forty-eight are actually taken up in the vertical game.
What I'm hoping you're getting a picture of is a young man who started thinking for himself about how he could best help his team win at basketball.
From an innovator's perspective, this is what would put Russell at the very top of my list of all basketball players in history. This archetype of the horizontal & vertical force who intimidated shots like nobody's business but who relied on non-vertical agility to do a whole bunch of other things that were valuable, Russell basically invented it. Not saying no one before had ever done anything like it, but it wasn't what was being taught by coaches.
In Russell's words:
On defense it was considered even worse to leave your feet…The idea was for the defensive player to keep himself between his man and the basket at all times. Prevent lay-ups, keep control, stay on your feet. By jumping you were simply telegraphing to your opponent that you could be faked into the air. Defenses had not begun to adjust to the jump shot.
Russell would be the one, then, who would make that adjustment and have the world take notice, and only after he did that did the coaches begin coaching players to do Russell-type things.
Note: As I say this you might be thinking that this can't be true because of the arrival of the Big Man in the '40s with George Mikan and Bob Kurland to college basketball. Some things to note:
Quickly after the arrival of those players, goaltending was introduced as a rule. Had it not, then certainly at-the-rim shot-blocking would have quickly become THE way to play defense.
So what Russell's talking about isn't the ability to get your hand considerably higher than the rim, but about aggressively blocking shots on the way up, and not just for your man, but from anybody on the other team, which wasn't seen as a realistic option until Russell.
Caveat: A distinction must be made between Kurland & Mikan. Kurland was the true mega-shot-blocker, not Mikan. As such, it's possible that Russell would have grown up in a different landscape had Kurland chosen to play pro ball.
With that said, Kurland was the the big man star of the US Olympic teams in their '48 & '52 gold medals, and Russell was the star of the '56 team. From what I've read, even for players used to getting beat by Kurland in the Olympics, Russell felt shockingly different because of his quickness.
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Russell and the FutureOkay, I've probably long since lost folks with my meanders, so let me try to tie this back together:
With what I've written so far I think it's clear why Russell would be my pre-Kareem GOAT, but what about Kareem and all the players who came after?
Well, Russell vs Kareem is a great comparison and I completely understand voting for Kareem. Kareem is literally a guy who I'd have given the DPOY to in some years, and I think his scoring impact was far more reliable than Wilt's. Shouldn't that be enough to give him the nod?
Well, when I think about player achievement, I have a tendency to focus on the team success of the player with more team success and ask myself if I think the other player can do better. And the thing is, I don't think Kareem's Celtics could match Russell's Celtics. I think in Kareem you've got someone more like a longer Kurland, whereas in Russell you've got a combination of length & quickness that was basically unheard of at least until Olajuwon.
I could see arguments for coming up with the ideal team with a comparable amount of supporting talent for Kareem being better than those Celtics, but there's really nothing I can imagine that I'd bet on winning 11 titles in 13 years.
Now, you might say, "Well but no one can do that, so Russell is going to be your GOAT forever", but this is where we get into the degree of difficulty of the league. It's not going to take the same title winning percentage to top Russell. What will it take? We'll see. It's not about hitting a particular pre-set threshold. It's a case-by-case comparison. I take both Jordan & LeBron as serious candidates to surpass Russell, and in 2020 I put both ahead of Russell.
But, that was coming from a perspective that was essentially 2020-oriented. Do I think Russell would be the best player in today's game? No. I think that once the shooters in the game got good enough, it decreased how much you could dominate the game as a defender, and that gives offensive stars the edge.
Thing is, it didn't just give Jordan & James the edge. It gives entire types of players the edge, so on what basis did I have Russell at #3? As I reflected, it just became undeniably inconsistent, and if I ran it back again, I'm not sure where Russell would have landed.
I'll admit to this feeling wrong to me, and that feeling influenced me to ruminate, but I do want to be clear that I don't like the idea of changing my criteria so that I can keep a particular player super-high. I suppose though, while I'm fine with Russell not being at the top of my list, the idea of him moving way far down just makes me feel like I'm doing it wrong.
Not that I'm the first person to think this - many, many people have thought I've done things wrong along these lines and criticized my approach as disrespecting the past. In the end though it's not so much about respecting the past being worthy of a particular spot on the list, but of how I want to try to rank guys from the past.
Do I want to try to gauge the Russells of the world primarily based on how they'd fair against a technique that exists because of a rule change that came about after (and because of) them?, or, Do I want to focus on why what they did in their day that was so worth remembering?
Viewed like this, it's the latter.
Back to Jordan & LeBron in comparison to Russell, it's not just that they have less rings, but that they have warts in their careers. Jordan was something of an individualist in a team game whose strengths allowed him to take game by the horns in his prime, but whose attitude had a destructiveness to it that showed itself more late in his career (Washington), but it's not like it wasn't there before. It could have tripped him up more severely in prime, and I feel like it was bound to cause problems as he aged.
LeBron on the other hand has a combination of missed opportunities and tendency to jump ship (or push those around him overboard) that I think has kept his career from reaching the heights of what I really still see as possible in today's game. Maybe I'll look back on this vote in the years to come and think this was naive - maybe no one will top him for decades to come and I'll end up again re-evaluating LeBron and putting back on top, but as things stand, I'm more impressed with what Russell did.
Vote 2: LeBron JamesNot going to go on too much depth here. I'm sure it's going to come down to LeBron vs MJ so they're the ones I'm thinking about, but even though I think Kareem is a worthy #1 candidate, I still have a tendency to side with the more modern players over him.
I had Jordan ahead of LeBron until the 2020 title, and was on record that I may move LeBron back down in 2023 - and this had nothing to do with a criteria change. It's just a thing that I have no qualms about saddling a guy with a negative value add if he does stuff that hurts his team, and acting as GM and making the worst move possible in letting go over your great supporting cast to add a superstar in your image who stopped being a superstar a while ago certainly qualifies.
In the end, all of this is relevant in a discussion about longevity. Prime vs Prime I'll side with Jordan still, though it is very close. I just admire the ferocity with which he drove those Bulls to title after title with some years yielding extreme records.
But I've long thought that longevity would be the thing that gave LeBron the edge, and frankly after 2020 I basically just felt like LeBron needed to show his capacity to just keep being a valuable star for a contender in some of those golden years, and I essentially projected that he would do so. The Westbrook move put all that into jeopardy.
But then they were able to get rid of Westbrook, and while there was also the good fortune of a guy like Austin Reaves emerging, fundamentally I thought LeBron looked heroic in the playoffs. He's not the best player in the world any more, he's not even the best on his own team, but when facing the best competition around, he continues to be the rock holding up better than near everyone else all in his 20th year in the league at an age where Jordan was showing just how myopic his approach really was.
Forced to choose, I'll give Bron the nod again.
