TLDR for Bill Russell?

[IlikeSHAIguys]

So realgm seems really high on him compared to everyone else and I'm not saying thats bad but I would like to know why without having to scroll through 100 threads for it.

Could I get a summary or a few links for Russells argument? I'm guessing its not just rings and such.

[MyUniBroDavis]

So realgm seems really high on him compared to everyone else and I'm not saying thats bad but I would like to know why without having to scroll through 100 threads for it.

Could I get a summary or a few links for Russells argument? I'm guessing its not just rings and such.

I’m not someone that rates him super high or anything esp in terms of like how good he was In an absolute sense, but


11 rings + His in era impact is crazy, that team isn’t nearly as highly regarded without him and those results can be seen when he was out and they fell off a cliff

Compared to everyone else is just a criteria thing, maybe some people aren’t as aware how impactful he was in era and that he wasn’t carried by 10 HOFers and that he’s a large reason some of his teammates made the hall, but the people that rate russell low generally just say it’s the era he was in and not being impressed by his ability in an absolute sense, a lot of people here either disagree with that evaluation or don’t care because guys can only play in the era they are in

But that discrepancy in criteria is why you’ll have some people who have him as a GOAT candidate and others who don’t put him top 10 despite evaluating him the same way

In general, people on this board are really high on him in terms of how good he was in an absolute sense, so not just compared to the guys he played with, although I disagree with them in that regard from what I’ve watched

[HeartBreakKid]

So realgm seems really high on him compared to everyone else and I'm not saying thats bad but I would like to know why without having to scroll through 100 threads for it.

Could I get a summary or a few links for Russells argument? I'm guessing its not just rings and such.

Some of the arguments against him and some counter points to it

1) He was short and so were people of his time

Players average heights were about an inch shorter than today and they were measured without shoes. So NBA players have been nearly the same height throughout time

Bill Russell was 6'10 without shoes which makes him about the same height as Dwight Howard and Hakeem Olajuwon. We also have pictures of him standing next to modern players and he is quite clearly a good size for a center which debunks the "he is Ben Wallace" comparison.

2) His team was stacked

His team was very talented by 1950s standards. But midway into the 60s when the NBA became more competitive and a lot of the older Celtic stars retired they were still competitive. The Celtics still won even in the late 60s when everyone and their mama was old except Hondo. His teams were not any more talented than most all time great's championship teams.

3) How do we know he was a great defender?

We actually saw that with Bill Russell the Celtic's defense was #1 by a gigantic margin. A margin that is so large that it is almost undeniable to attribute the success to him. The gap between #1 and #2 was the same as #2 and the last defense (#8 I think 1957).

In addition to that they were the #1 defense every single year that he played maybe an exception here and there, and very much were not the #1 defense the year after he retired.

The Celtics had a middling offense and won simply because their defense was so suppressing.

4) Defenders can't be more valuable than offensive players

But Bill was valued by many to be as valuable as Wilt Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson. Wilt Chamberlain is a volume scorer the same vain as the ones that are poplar today, putting up insane numbers like 50 PPG. Oscar was an APG leading point guard with modern handles. Neither one was seen as clearly superior to Russell who won MVP's over them as well, so he was acknowledged by many to be the top player not just a ring argument or he had a great team.


5) He wouldn't be a top player today


Actually, we see players who are all-stars just on the virtue of being great run and jump long centers who can protect the rim and dunk. It isn't that inconceivable that if you took one of them, made them smarter, faster, more offensively skilled, better passer, and one of the GOAT rebounders that he would be as valuable as an MVP player. Think if Dennis Rodman had the shot blocking of Rudy Gobert and maybe the offensive game of Andrew Bogut (but more potential for to become a pick and roll player which wasn't really a thing in his time to boost his efficiency). That would be a serious problem for teams to deal with.



Hope that broke down some of the things quickly enough.

[AdagioPace]

in short:
He led GOAT defensive teams, by huge margins relative to era, for multiple years. Given Russel's amazing athletic and cognitive abilities (as shown in footage), the "relative to peers" part seem to lose restrictive connotation.

[OhayoKD]

So realgm seems really high on him compared to everyone else and I'm not saying thats bad but I would like to know why without having to scroll through 100 threads for it.

Could I get a summary or a few links for Russells argument? I'm guessing its not just rings and such.

Some nice TLDR's here already so I'll just focus on the "link" part of your request. I think the main gist of things is this:

11 rings + His in era impact is crazy, that team isn’t nearly as highly regarded without him and those results can be seen when he was out and they fell off a cliff

Compared to everyone else is just a criteria thing, maybe some people aren’t as aware how impactful he was in era and that he wasn’t carried by 10 HOFers and that he’s a large reason some of his teammates made the hall, but the people that rate russell low generally just say it’s the era he was in and not being impressed by his ability in an absolute sense, a lot of people here either disagree with that evaluation or don’t care because guys can only play in the era they are in

But that discrepancy in criteria is why you’ll have some people who have him as a GOAT candidate and others who don’t put him top 10 despite evaluating him the same way

If you want something more specific, I think Rishkar, lurker, and ShaqA do a good job (starting) here:
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=108506926#p108506926

Spoiler:

I do not think I am - I made mention of their rosters in previous comments and called attention to Russell triumphing over Wilt and West paired together. I think a neutral look at the numbers leaves little room to argue Russell's teams being the most dominant was not a byproduct of him being the most individually dominant. You may argue otherwise - but I would think leaning so heavily on the outcomes of a project would support this - even if that project had not ended with Russell winning the most votes over a shorter career.

Nonetheless - if one is to look at Wilt's record against opponents not named Russell as evidence of his individual dominance - i think it makes sense to bring up Russell's record against Wilt.

I'm confused why you consider that objectionable.

So your context is "Russell beat Wilt and West together"? That does not include an over the hill Elgin Baylor being a detriment to the Lakers, it does not include Havlicek averaging an efficient 28/11/4 and playing all 48 minutes every game, it does not include the Celtics having better depth with the likes of Bailey Howell and Don Nelson. It does not check out for me. Things are being way oversimplified to prop up Russell, which is a shame because his accomplishments do not need to be embellished.

As to me using POY rankings as a reference, would you prefer if I threw around my personal rankings instead as an argument despite them having no concrete meaning or holding any real weight with anyone but myself? Or is the only option to collect a bunch of raw stats and point to them as objective impact? I'm not going to participate in basketball analysis becoming entirely dependent on spreadsheets and especially not for limited samples of the pre-databall era. If that makes me basketball satan, so be it.

Hondo averaged 29/8/9 in 1971. The Celtics had also replaced Russell with a great coach and a great center in Cowens - the result was not awe inspiring. The team improved again in 1972 but I'd struggle to say they were legitimate title contenders. A similar story isn't there for the teams of the two players with 5 less championships. Neither can say they beat a team like the Wilt-West Lakers - not that the Knicks were scrubs.

I do not understand your point on Baylor. The fit was not great but that is a talented third-option. Better than anyone besides Hondo on Boston. Should we dismiss 1971 because the Lakers were injured? 91 for the Lakers being banged up. The Jazz for running an archaic offense? 2012 because the best team - by srs - in the league lost its best player?

I don't think I am embellishing what was accomplished - at least no more than you are trying to undersell it.

And I do think raw data, and MVP's, and championships against unusually talented rosters makes for better reasoning than simply looking at POY votes and - instead of looking at the final result which validates Russell's unprecedented dominance - determining that #1 is not #1 because the way he got to #1 is not your cup of tea.

I'm also confused by your unwillingness to engage in what I think makes an obvious elephant - POY voting would skew against Russell the most.

But set this aside - penbeast made a point about team-success. I made a response in kind. You replied to that response and said it indicates I was only interested in team-success. Is that not a strawman?

Jabbar is arguably the greatest player in NBA history. The only other players in contention are probably Chamberlain, Russell, Jordan, James (anyone else?).

I think Tim Duncan has a case based on his leadership.

I simply think Kareem has a bit more question marks around him than Russell

How many HOFers did Russell have as teammates?

The hall of famers argument is weird to me. Outside of K.C. Jones (who I feel is similar to Alex Caruso), Sanders (who reminds me of Royce O'Neal), Havlicek (who I think of as similar to Pippen), he didn't have much defensive help. He was shutting down Wilt chamberlain to Jimmy Butler's '19-'20 season scoring rate (higher totals because of his insane minutes averages) and doing this to other centers https://backpicks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Russell-v-All-Star-Centers.png In '62 through '65, he led 4 of the 5 greatest defenses in NBA history. Across that span, he averaged 44.325 minutes per game, with the second-highest Celtic in each of those years averaging 33.2 minutes per game. I struggle to attribute that defensive impact to anyone else (especially given the Celtic's collapse when he retires) and struggle to see his teams as loaded in offensive talent when the Celtics regularly had such weak offenses. I think Cousy, Heinsohn, Sharman, and early career Havlicek are all decently overrated because at the time they played Boston had an incredibly high pace (and per-possession efficiency wasn't really thought much about), and coaches and players thought that having more possessions was the way to win basketball games (more opportunities to score). Russell and Havlicek both thought that Bill was a better offensive player than defensive (an idea I don't buy into myself) but he was obviously capable of initiating fastbreaks at an elite level due to his rebounding (might be the greatest rebounder ever, especially on a per minute basis), passing, and ability to drive the ball up the court himself without having to pass to one of his guards. This skill was more valuable in his era, where it was harder to score in the halfcourt because of the lack of spacing.

Supporting the "better competition" point...
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=107591670#p107591670

Spoiler:

VOTE: Bill Russell
Nominate: George Mikan Kevin Garnett

Russell’s Celtics led the league in regular season SRS for the first ten years of his career, and they were three points clear of the next best team on six occasions. He literally never lost a Game 7, nor did he ever lose a 1-2 or 2-3 series where he played five games. He maintained a winning record on the road (4-1), as an SRS underdog (3-1), and as a road SRS underdog (2-1), with the one common exception there being against the greatest team in the history of the league at that time. Russell retired with a 3-1* record against Bob Pettit (#25 in the last top 100), a 3-0 record against Oscar Robertson (#14 in the last top 100), a 6-0 record against Elgin Baylor (#33 in the last top 100), a 6-0 record against Jerry West (#13 in the last top 100), a 5-0 record against the pair of them, and a 7-1 record against Wilt Chamberlain (#6 in the last top 100).

He closed his career by serving as a player-coach and was consequently one of the few players to be the best player on title teams with distinct rosters and head coaches. In that role, he:

- came back 3-1 on the road against an 8-SRS defending champion 76ers team;
- won the title over a Lakers team that had generated an even higher MoV when West played than the MoV of those 76ers;
- and then repeated as champions by winning three road series (only matched by the 1995 Rockets), including series against the Wilt/West/Baylor super-team and against a Knicks team that with DeBusschere had been even better than those 1968 76ers and Lakers teams.

By my personal count he was the best player in his league at least six times; no remaining candidate hits six even with a generous assessment. I voted him at #2 and think he has the easiest #1 case. While I understand voting him lower based on questions over his inability to recreate his impossible defensive outlier status in later eras, that to me is only one element of “greatness”, and with Russell’s level of separation in every other element, those concerns are not enough for me to move him outside of this enshrined top four.

Absolutely no one dominated their own league like Russell did. You look at other sports… Henri Richard had 11 titles, but over a larger timespan and not all as the best player. Yogi Burrell had 10 titles, and again over a longer timespan and not all as the best player. Russell went 11/13 while coming fresh off two NCAA titles, and he was the best player on his team for every one of them (as is disproportionately the case in basketball). He is the greatest individual winner in team sports, and he always will be.

For my next votes I will be looking at either Duncan or Hakeem.

Lastly(and least on-topic), "everywhere else" generally views statistics differently than the parts of this board that are most pro-russell(and consequently may lead to other differences in general opinion regarding certain players):
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=108614041#p108614041

Spoiler:

The emotional fallout of a dynasty? Really? Where was this emotional fallout in 94 and 95. Why didn't emotional fallout stop the Warriors from winning a title after they replaced durant, iggy, and klay's prime-drop off with wiggins and jordan poole. Why didn't it stop the Celtics from nearly making the conference without Larry Bird.

It is "cold data" because there is no directional bias. There are complex variables everywhere with everything, but in a sport where the goal of a player is to make teams better, directly looking at the largest possible samples regarding "did the team get better" is as "cold" as it gets.

Talking about "emotional fallout" to explain away a team's drop-off after everything was replaced is very much the opposite of cold data. Just as it is when you use box-score composites derived from entirely subjective values attached to entirely subjective decisions made by humans regarding what to count and what not to count.

When you bring up box-score stats as proof of how good players are, even when those players are playing on average offenses which only actually won because of defense, you are introducing a shitton of complex vairables. The difference is your complex variables are biased towards certain types playstyles/forms of production. Our complex variables are biased towards winning.

Which bias do you think is more relevant to assessing a player's ability to improve teams?

the "box-score" and "skillset analysis" are completely subjective and who they "favor" is entirely dependent on what you count which of course, can only be tied to winning if you use...winning. If I wanted to make a box-score that only counted defensive components, Russell would likely have the best defensive box-score. If I wanted to do skillset analysis that way, he would have the best skillset too. And there's no real reason to think that would be less accurate for the 60(or even the 70's really) than ws/48 or per or the like

...

What exactly do you consider a "meaningful" factor which you can "stake your opinion" on which doesn't support Russell as a scale-breaker?

WS/48 is no more meaningful than a defensive only box-score with defensive only weightings describing how a team with an average offense and the best ever defense won 11 times. You could probably get more accurate title predictions those years just counting whose center deterred or deflecting more shots than you would get with per or ws/48 or whatever meaningful factor you are considering that suggests russell is worse than lebron or jordan or whoever.

That might not matter if you are playing the time-machine game, but the original contention was that Russell was lacking in individual dominance. It's all well and good saying "well it's not 100 percent because of variance", but if we are going to positively argue Russell was not the most dominant(or actually less individually dominant than Lebron, Kareem, and Jordan), then you I'd expect evidence that actually supports that, not simply a criticism of a stat as "flawed".

Bonus:
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2323822&hilit=bpm&start=40

Spoiler:

Note it was very hard to make out players(besides pippen whose got a nasty case of roblox head), so i could be misattributing here and there though I used jersey numbers, names, commentator[url][/url]s, and head/body shapes the best i could. I also counted "splits" for both parties(which is why the numbers don't add up to 40)


Distribution went

Pippen/Grant
14 each

Purdue
6 or 7

Cartwright
4

Armstrong/Jordan
1 each

FWIW, Grant seemed more significantly more effective than Pippen but otoh, Pippen was trusted to deal with laimbeer far more than anyone else

All that aside, what's notable here is that it's the non-bigs who are checking rim threats the most. Not the centres. With one of the two deterring attempts, sometimes on an island, the rest of the team was enabled to try and force turnovers with suffocating pressure.

...

Fwiw, in this game, Pippen and Grant, the two defenders protecting the paint more than anyone, ended with 0 blocks. As did the centers who protected the paint more than anyone else. Jordan and Livingston ended with 2. And now BPM, unless I am misuderstanding the writeup, is giving bonus points to those 2 blocks on the assumption they're especially valuable. Here's what it's saying is an extra valuable play:
https://youtu.be/iZlw-GzD9AA?t=200

As we can see here, Jordan is not the rim defender. He stops the shot largely thanks to a bigger attacker occupying Aguire and thus distracting him from Jordan.

Even if this sort of curve makes the metric more accurate with a league-worth of players(And I'd be interested if you could elaborate on the regressions you ran), for the purposes of this project where a ton of defenders who would be the runaway leaders on their teams in terms of "rim-load" still on the board, and countless more who would significantly outpace any guard, I'm skeptical of this metric's balance.

For a larger sample we can look at player-tracking(which is still limited in terms of only being able to track when a player is the closest to a shot) now available for the likes of embid who has finished in the top 5 once for blocks but is in a tier of his own with gobert in terms of deterring shots:

Happy reading!

As for a TLDR:
-> best resume
-> beat winning(by far)
-> is the one guy with a winning statistical argument(at least for peak/prime) vs Lebron(Kareem has a theoretical case as a peer fwiw)
-> best intangibles(also probably by far)

If you're going to deviate from just picking the modern giant still looking elite in the league's most talented period, Russell is the most natural alternative I think(Kareem is there but his argument is just going to get narrower the longer Lebron keeps this up).

[AussieBuck]

So realgm seems really high on him compared to everyone else and I'm not saying thats bad but I would like to know why without having to scroll through 100 threads for it.

Could I get a summary or a few links for Russells argument? I'm guessing its not just rings and such.

70sfan on this board has posted a bunch of video on him. He'll probably turn up here and help out. For me, watching games from the 60s, Russell and Jerry West stand out wildly as all timers against the field.

My view on him is he had Tim Duncan's defensive IQ with Giannis' athleticism, on offense he was closer to KG (similar body too) without the killer mid range jumper. Maybe sprinkle in Kevin Love's outlet passing.

I think it's reasonable to argue that his value was as high as it could have been in his era due to shooting being poor so focus was on scoring near the bucket where he could defensively ruin your plans. Maybe in today's NBA he'd be less valuable but given I tend to judge on how you did in your time, I remain happy to have him in my Russell/Kareem/Jordan/Lebron GOAT tier.

Definitely catch a Lakers-Celtics game though from then if you find one. He'll stand out in any game posted.

Also, someone should help out and GIF him casually jumping over that dude's head on a fast break.

[penbeast0]

I think people are greatly overrating Russell's offense here. When he came into the league he was your basic 6-11 amazing raw athlete without great offensive skills. He had a 50s shooting game (sweeping hooks and short jumpers) which became more and more obsolete as the end of the 50s, beginning of the 60s was a major transitional period for the league. As his scoring went from okay to bad, he made himself a good passer but I see no signs of his being a great one and calling the offenses he played in average is polite to unrealistic, they were mediocre to bad. He's not Ben Wallace bad, but he isn't an impressive offensive player.

On the other hand, it doesn't matter because if you are looking at defensive impact, all the indicators we have show him as not just great but ridiculous outlier great. Steph Curry v. other 3 point shooters great. And, defense affects a lot more of the game than Curry's shooting. Add to that, he was the best per minute rebounder of his era (Wilt played more minutes and did better head to head) and his coach on the floor BBIQ plus a strong degree of luck and you get an amazing title winning machine.

[LukaTheGOAT]

https://thinkingbasketball.net/2018/04/02/backpicks-goat-3-bill-russell/

[Djoker]

Russell isn't the GOAT in the absolute sense ex. if you transported him to the modern NBA, he wouldn't be the best player. In his era, being a paint protector is the most valuable asset on the basketball court because most shots were taken very close to the rim. But that line of reasoning is flawed because he couldn't choose when he was born. I guess everyone today with a Bachelor's Degree in Physics is a greater physicist than Isaac Newton because they know more. I disagree... It only make sense to look at impact relative to era.

Basically Russell is the GOAT to me because he won the most titles (11) while having massive impact on his team. Before he joined, when he missed games, and after he left, those teams totally fell apart. Defensively he was worth about 6-7 points on DRtg which is incredible. His teams won despite being average and even below average on offense.



Notice that he joined the team in 1956-57 and left after 1968-69.

[SNPA]

So realgm seems really high on him compared to everyone else and I'm not saying thats bad but I would like to know why without having to scroll through 100 threads for it.

Could I get a summary or a few links for Russells argument? I'm guessing its not just rings and such.

He won in high school.
He won in college.
He won in the Olympics.
He won his rookie year.
He won his last year.
He won 9 of 11 times in between.
He won as a player.
He won as a coach.
Everywhere he went, different levels and different teammates, he won.

TLDR: He was a winner.

[Doctor MJ]

My post advocating for Russell for #1:

Vote 1: Bill Russell



The Great Rivals
Alright, 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 Basketball

Which 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 Law

Any 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 Regular
Okay, 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 Archetype
Alright, 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 Revolutionary
Now, 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 Russell

Within 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 Future
Okay, 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.

[pancakes3]

you want to give a tl;dr for that tl;dr?

[tsherkin]

I think people are greatly overrating Russell's offense here. When he came into the league he was your basic 6-11 amazing raw athlete without great offensive skills. He had a 50s shooting game (sweeping hooks and short jumpers) which became more and more obsolete as the end of the 50s, beginning of the 60s was a major transitional period for the league. As his scoring went from okay to bad, he made himself a good passer but I see no signs of his being a great one and calling the offenses he played in average is polite to unrealistic, they were mediocre to bad. He's not Ben Wallace bad, but he isn't an impressive offensive player.

Yeah, basically after 1962, his relevance as a scoring threat dropped off pretty sharply as he became routinely below-average in efficiency (with the exception of 67)...

BUT. He was never a 20 ppg scorer. Russ topped out at 18.9 ppg on 16.6 FGA/g in 45.2 mpg. He just didn't shoot that much, so his inefficacy wasn't nearly as problematic as his raw efficiency might otherwise indicate. He wasn't a stunning passer, but he wasn't a bad one. His greatest impact was unquestionably on the defensive end. He definitely leaned hard into his defensive relevance (per Auerbach's own commentary) at the expense of offense. He wasn't very good on offense relative to his peers.

There is also that he won 7 or 8 games across 2 series to win each of his first 8 titles, which is at least something to raise in discussion of that ring count.

Portability forward in time isn't his favorite argument in terms of impact retention, but he'd still be a very good defender today... which is impressive. Very impressive. He played his last games in the 68-69 season, so that's like 3 quarters of a century later and following a great deal of evolution in many aspects of the sport. He projects to still be a high-end defender with contemporary coaching and training techniques. He's also sort of the father of the dominant defensive center which was a paradigm for decades and decades after he retired.

5 MVPs. No DPOY in his day. All-Defensive Team started in literally his final season (and he was 1st Team). He crushed his own era about as well as he could have done. Can only play the games of your own time, after all. How we all weigh things differs, sometimes quite considerably, but at some point, Russ has the accolades and the achievements to stand with just about anyone. Whether or not you ultimately label him the GOAT, he's got an argument for himself because he was the greatest winner with the league environment of his time. You can say similar things about Mikan. Both of them are strong examples, however, for why cross-era comparison is pretty terrible stuff, and evaluating guys within a more relevant/adjacent time frame is much more sensible.

[tsherkin]

you want to give a tl;dr for that tl;dr?

"Read Doctor MJ's post if you'd like to understand in any kind of substantial depth why Russell was amazing."

[rk2023]

I'm higher on him now thinking what I value more, and have him top 2 all time. Everybody in this thread essentially covered it, but one another thing to add on my end: I think for his time - Russell has both GOAT level indicators and skillset for floor AND ceiling raising.

[Doctor MJ]

you want to give a tl;dr for that tl;dr?

For the heck of it, I put my post into ChatGPT and told it to boil it down. Not looking to respond to rebuttal to ChatGPT's version of my words, but maybe it will prove easier for folks to read:

Winning Legacy: Russell's winning-bias arguments favor his GOAT status due to consistent team success.

Defensive Dominance: Russell's era emphasized defensive impact, giving him an edge over offensive-centric players.

'66-'67 76ers Example: The success of the '66-'67 76ers, with Wilt focusing less on scoring, supports arguments for team-oriented play.

Era Recognition: Acknowledgment that winning titles held different importance in Russell's era, impacting his approach.

Consistency and Discipline: Russell's consistent success over an extended period showcases his discipline and team mindset.

Revolutionary Defense: Russell's defensive innovations, including shot-blocking, revolutionized basketball strategy.

Influence on Defensive Approaches: Russell played a pivotal role in changing defensive strategies, impacting how the game is played.

Team Success vs. Individual Achievements: Russell vs. Kareem comparison emphasizes team success as a crucial criterion.

Modern Player Potential: Recognition of the potential for modern players like Jordan and LeBron to surpass Russell.

Reflective Rankings: Admission of inconsistency in past rankings, prompting reflection on evaluation criteria.

Flaws in Other GOAT Contenders: Acknowledgment of individual flaws in the careers of players like Jordan and LeBron compared to Russell.

Adaptation to Changing Eras: Consideration of how Russell's style might not dominate in today's offensive-focused game.

[Heej]

Quick summary imo:

-Arguably had the highest IQ in NBA history
-Arguably the most competitive and disciplined player of all time
-Tier 1 athlete, arguably the most athletic player of his era when factoring in functional athleticism (deceleration, fluidity, dexterity, reaction speed, motor, etc)
-Best defender of all time statistically and arguably the most superior and complete defender in all eras going by his build
-One of the top pivot passers of his era, and arguably an all time pivot passer
-One of the best transition players (offense and defense) all time

He's what I call "a perfect storm". Very few athletes have the natural gifts/athletic build, IQ, work ethic, and durability all in one package. Russell not only has every factor, he has every single factor at an S tier level. That's what makes him a GOAT contender and that's why I call it the perfect storm. Because that's the kind of concoction it takes for a person to reach the GOAT level in anything, let alone basketball.

If he grew up in this era, with his natural agility and dexterity I imagine he would've become one of those prototype ballhandling/playmaking big men that are taking over the league.

[IlikeSHAIguys]

So realgm seems really high on him compared to everyone else and I'm not saying thats bad but I would like to know why without having to scroll through 100 threads for it.

Could I get a summary or a few links for Russells argument? I'm guessing its not just rings and such.

I’m not someone that rates him super high or anything esp in terms of like how good he was In an absolute sense, but


11 rings + His in era impact is crazy, that team isn’t nearly as highly regarded without him and those results can be seen when he was out and they fell off a cliff

Compared to everyone else is just a criteria thing, maybe some people aren’t as aware how impactful he was in era and that he wasn’t carried by 10 HOFers and that he’s a large reason some of his teammates made the hall, but the people that rate russell low generally just say it’s the era he was in and not being impressed by his ability in an absolute sense, a lot of people here either disagree with that evaluation or don’t care because guys can only play in the era they are in

But that discrepancy in criteria is why you’ll have some people who have him as a GOAT candidate and others who don’t put him top 10 despite evaluating him the same way

In general, people on this board are really high on him in terms of how good he was in an absolute sense, so not just compared to the guys he played with, although I disagree with them in that regard from what I’ve watched

If what everyone is saying is true then it seems like if you're not going Lebron Russell is probably the old-guy to go for. Seems like super MJ tbh.

[IlikeSHAIguys]

So realgm seems really high on him compared to everyone else and I'm not saying thats bad but I would like to know why without having to scroll through 100 threads for it.

Could I get a summary or a few links for Russells argument? I'm guessing its not just rings and such.

Some nice TLDR's here already so I'll just focus on the "link" part of your request. I think the main gist of things is this:

11 rings + His in era impact is crazy, that team isn’t nearly as highly regarded without him and those results can be seen when he was out and they fell off a cliff

Compared to everyone else is just a criteria thing, maybe some people aren’t as aware how impactful he was in era and that he wasn’t carried by 10 HOFers and that he’s a large reason some of his teammates made the hall, but the people that rate russell low generally just say it’s the era he was in and not being impressed by his ability in an absolute sense, a lot of people here either disagree with that evaluation or don’t care because guys can only play in the era they are in

But that discrepancy in criteria is why you’ll have some people who have him as a GOAT candidate and others who don’t put him top 10 despite evaluating him the same way

If you want something more specific, I think Rishkar, lurker, and ShaqA do a good job (starting) here:
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=108506926#p108506926

Spoiler:

So your context is "Russell beat Wilt and West together"? That does not include an over the hill Elgin Baylor being a detriment to the Lakers, it does not include Havlicek averaging an efficient 28/11/4 and playing all 48 minutes every game, it does not include the Celtics having better depth with the likes of Bailey Howell and Don Nelson. It does not check out for me. Things are being way oversimplified to prop up Russell, which is a shame because his accomplishments do not need to be embellished.

As to me using POY rankings as a reference, would you prefer if I threw around my personal rankings instead as an argument despite them having no concrete meaning or holding any real weight with anyone but myself? Or is the only option to collect a bunch of raw stats and point to them as objective impact? I'm not going to participate in basketball analysis becoming entirely dependent on spreadsheets and especially not for limited samples of the pre-databall era. If that makes me basketball satan, so be it.

Hondo averaged 29/8/9 in 1971. The Celtics had also replaced Russell with a great coach and a great center in Cowens - the result was not awe inspiring. The team improved again in 1972 but I'd struggle to say they were legitimate title contenders. A similar story isn't there for the teams of the two players with 5 less championships. Neither can say they beat a team like the Wilt-West Lakers - not that the Knicks were scrubs.

I do not understand your point on Baylor. The fit was not great but that is a talented third-option. Better than anyone besides Hondo on Boston. Should we dismiss 1971 because the Lakers were injured? 91 for the Lakers being banged up. The Jazz for running an archaic offense? 2012 because the best team - by srs - in the league lost its best player?

I don't think I am embellishing what was accomplished - at least no more than you are trying to undersell it.

And I do think raw data, and MVP's, and championships against unusually talented rosters makes for better reasoning than simply looking at POY votes and - instead of looking at the final result which validates Russell's unprecedented dominance - determining that #1 is not #1 because the way he got to #1 is not your cup of tea.

I'm also confused by your unwillingness to engage in what I think makes an obvious elephant - POY voting would skew against Russell the most.

But set this aside - penbeast made a point about team-success. I made a response in kind. You replied to that response and said it indicates I was only interested in team-success. Is that not a strawman?

Jabbar is arguably the greatest player in NBA history. The only other players in contention are probably Chamberlain, Russell, Jordan, James (anyone else?).

I think Tim Duncan has a case based on his leadership.

I simply think Kareem has a bit more question marks around him than Russell

How many HOFers did Russell have as teammates?

The hall of famers argument is weird to me. Outside of K.C. Jones (who I feel is similar to Alex Caruso), Sanders (who reminds me of Royce O'Neal), Havlicek (who I think of as similar to Pippen), he didn't have much defensive help. He was shutting down Wilt chamberlain to Jimmy Butler's '19-'20 season scoring rate (higher totals because of his insane minutes averages) and doing this to other centers https://backpicks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Russell-v-All-Star-Centers.png In '62 through '65, he led 4 of the 5 greatest defenses in NBA history. Across that span, he averaged 44.325 minutes per game, with the second-highest Celtic in each of those years averaging 33.2 minutes per game. I struggle to attribute that defensive impact to anyone else (especially given the Celtic's collapse when he retires) and struggle to see his teams as loaded in offensive talent when the Celtics regularly had such weak offenses. I think Cousy, Heinsohn, Sharman, and early career Havlicek are all decently overrated because at the time they played Boston had an incredibly high pace (and per-possession efficiency wasn't really thought much about), and coaches and players thought that having more possessions was the way to win basketball games (more opportunities to score). Russell and Havlicek both thought that Bill was a better offensive player than defensive (an idea I don't buy into myself) but he was obviously capable of initiating fastbreaks at an elite level due to his rebounding (might be the greatest rebounder ever, especially on a per minute basis), passing, and ability to drive the ball up the court himself without having to pass to one of his guards. This skill was more valuable in his era, where it was harder to score in the halfcourt because of the lack of spacing.

Supporting the "better competition" point...
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=107591670#p107591670

Spoiler:

VOTE: Bill Russell
Nominate: George Mikan Kevin Garnett

Russell’s Celtics led the league in regular season SRS for the first ten years of his career, and they were three points clear of the next best team on six occasions. He literally never lost a Game 7, nor did he ever lose a 1-2 or 2-3 series where he played five games. He maintained a winning record on the road (4-1), as an SRS underdog (3-1), and as a road SRS underdog (2-1), with the one common exception there being against the greatest team in the history of the league at that time. Russell retired with a 3-1* record against Bob Pettit (#25 in the last top 100), a 3-0 record against Oscar Robertson (#14 in the last top 100), a 6-0 record against Elgin Baylor (#33 in the last top 100), a 6-0 record against Jerry West (#13 in the last top 100), a 5-0 record against the pair of them, and a 7-1 record against Wilt Chamberlain (#6 in the last top 100).

He closed his career by serving as a player-coach and was consequently one of the few players to be the best player on title teams with distinct rosters and head coaches. In that role, he:

- came back 3-1 on the road against an 8-SRS defending champion 76ers team;
- won the title over a Lakers team that had generated an even higher MoV when West played than the MoV of those 76ers;
- and then repeated as champions by winning three road series (only matched by the 1995 Rockets), including series against the Wilt/West/Baylor super-team and against a Knicks team that with DeBusschere had been even better than those 1968 76ers and Lakers teams.

By my personal count he was the best player in his league at least six times; no remaining candidate hits six even with a generous assessment. I voted him at #2 and think he has the easiest #1 case. While I understand voting him lower based on questions over his inability to recreate his impossible defensive outlier status in later eras, that to me is only one element of “greatness”, and with Russell’s level of separation in every other element, those concerns are not enough for me to move him outside of this enshrined top four.

Absolutely no one dominated their own league like Russell did. You look at other sports… Henri Richard had 11 titles, but over a larger timespan and not all as the best player. Yogi Burrell had 10 titles, and again over a longer timespan and not all as the best player. Russell went 11/13 while coming fresh off two NCAA titles, and he was the best player on his team for every one of them (as is disproportionately the case in basketball). He is the greatest individual winner in team sports, and he always will be.

For my next votes I will be looking at either Duncan or Hakeem.

Lastly(and least on-topic), "everywhere else" generally views statistics differently than the parts of this board that are most pro-russell(and consequently may lead to other differences in general opinion regarding certain players):
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=108614041#p108614041

Spoiler:

The emotional fallout of a dynasty? Really? Where was this emotional fallout in 94 and 95. Why didn't emotional fallout stop the Warriors from winning a title after they replaced durant, iggy, and klay's prime-drop off with wiggins and jordan poole. Why didn't it stop the Celtics from nearly making the conference without Larry Bird.

It is "cold data" because there is no directional bias. There are complex variables everywhere with everything, but in a sport where the goal of a player is to make teams better, directly looking at the largest possible samples regarding "did the team get better" is as "cold" as it gets.

Talking about "emotional fallout" to explain away a team's drop-off after everything was replaced is very much the opposite of cold data. Just as it is when you use box-score composites derived from entirely subjective values attached to entirely subjective decisions made by humans regarding what to count and what not to count.

When you bring up box-score stats as proof of how good players are, even when those players are playing on average offenses which only actually won because of defense, you are introducing a shitton of complex vairables. The difference is your complex variables are biased towards certain types playstyles/forms of production. Our complex variables are biased towards winning.

Which bias do you think is more relevant to assessing a player's ability to improve teams?

the "box-score" and "skillset analysis" are completely subjective and who they "favor" is entirely dependent on what you count which of course, can only be tied to winning if you use...winning. If I wanted to make a box-score that only counted defensive components, Russell would likely have the best defensive box-score. If I wanted to do skillset analysis that way, he would have the best skillset too. And there's no real reason to think that would be less accurate for the 60(or even the 70's really) than ws/48 or per or the like

...

What exactly do you consider a "meaningful" factor which you can "stake your opinion" on which doesn't support Russell as a scale-breaker?

WS/48 is no more meaningful than a defensive only box-score with defensive only weightings describing how a team with an average offense and the best ever defense won 11 times. You could probably get more accurate title predictions those years just counting whose center deterred or deflecting more shots than you would get with per or ws/48 or whatever meaningful factor you are considering that suggests russell is worse than lebron or jordan or whoever.

That might not matter if you are playing the time-machine game, but the original contention was that Russell was lacking in individual dominance. It's all well and good saying "well it's not 100 percent because of variance", but if we are going to positively argue Russell was not the most dominant(or actually less individually dominant than Lebron, Kareem, and Jordan), then you I'd expect evidence that actually supports that, not simply a criticism of a stat as "flawed".

Bonus:
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2323822&hilit=bpm&start=40

Spoiler:

Note it was very hard to make out players(besides pippen whose got a nasty case of roblox head), so i could be misattributing here and there though I used jersey numbers, names, commentator[url][/url]s, and head/body shapes the best i could. I also counted "splits" for both parties(which is why the numbers don't add up to 40)


Distribution went

Pippen/Grant
14 each

Purdue
6 or 7

Cartwright
4

Armstrong/Jordan
1 each

FWIW, Grant seemed more significantly more effective than Pippen but otoh, Pippen was trusted to deal with laimbeer far more than anyone else

All that aside, what's notable here is that it's the non-bigs who are checking rim threats the most. Not the centres. With one of the two deterring attempts, sometimes on an island, the rest of the team was enabled to try and force turnovers with suffocating pressure.

...

Fwiw, in this game, Pippen and Grant, the two defenders protecting the paint more than anyone, ended with 0 blocks. As did the centers who protected the paint more than anyone else. Jordan and Livingston ended with 2. And now BPM, unless I am misuderstanding the writeup, is giving bonus points to those 2 blocks on the assumption they're especially valuable. Here's what it's saying is an extra valuable play:
https://youtu.be/iZlw-GzD9AA?t=200

As we can see here, Jordan is not the rim defender. He stops the shot largely thanks to a bigger attacker occupying Aguire and thus distracting him from Jordan.

Even if this sort of curve makes the metric more accurate with a league-worth of players(And I'd be interested if you could elaborate on the regressions you ran), for the purposes of this project where a ton of defenders who would be the runaway leaders on their teams in terms of "rim-load" still on the board, and countless more who would significantly outpace any guard, I'm skeptical of this metric's balance.

For a larger sample we can look at player-tracking(which is still limited in terms of only being able to track when a player is the closest to a shot) now available for the likes of embid who has finished in the top 5 once for blocks but is in a tier of his own with gobert in terms of deterring shots:

Happy reading!

As for a TLDR:
-> best resume
-> beat winning(by far)
-> is the one guy with a winning statistical argument(at least for peak/prime) vs Lebron(Kareem has a theoretical case as a peer fwiw)
-> best intangibles(also probably by far)

If you're going to deviate from just picking the modern giant still looking elite in the league's most talented period, Russell is the most natural alternative I think(Kareem is there but his argument is just going to get narrower the longer Lebron keeps this up).

Sir this is a wendys.

[VanWest82]

Tl;dr He was so dominant defensively that it made up for the fact that he was a minus offensively. The degree to which he was a minus offensively is where reasonable minds seem to disagree. Also, pro-Russell people tend not to agree with or outright disagree with the notion that he wasn't even the best player in his own era.