Texas Chuck wrote:Disagree with some assumptions here.
But let's start easy. Jason Kidd, another all-time basketball genius comes into the league not being a shooter, and a mediocre FT shooter to boot. Yet, when he retires only one guy had made more 3's in NBA history than him. Brook Lopez, not known as a basketball genius watched his NBA paycheck go from max to min and totally reinvented himself. Nobody would have ever suggested he would go to DPOY level defender and floor spacer. Yet here we are.
But a Bill Russell who grows up having seen guys his size and bigger spamming 3's wouldn't have worked at something clearly of value? People do realize there was no value in him doing that in his day. Instead he correctly focused on what helped him win games then.
Or he can't grab and go today when he's allowed to carry the ball, even though in the limited footage we have available we see him doing this having to dribble with his hand on top of the ball at all times?
Or a great outlet passer, a pretty good half-court passer, couldn't be used in that role? He's reduced to DeAndre Jordan or Dwight Powell? Really?
These assumptions don't seem particularly reasonable or the most likely. They seem the most convenient. Our assumptions that ignore actual test cases are too limiting and shouldn't be relied upon anywhere to this degree.
I can't say if Bill Russell would even play basketball if born in 2001. He'd certainly have more options available to him today. But we need some assumption for this thread, so him playing basketball seems reasonable and quite plausible. Him choosing not to work on skills needed in the modern game seems very unlikely to me though. I won't make the claim he becomes a stretch 5. I can't. I won't make the claim he becomes an offensive hub. I can't. But nor will I suggest he's just a lob threat and a guy who just stands in the paint defensively(this one particularly egregious because he is the reason bigs don't defend like that now!!!).
I know this is for deaf ears. But I have to at least show some other, more likely imo, assumptions we could make based both on what we know of Russell, but also on what we have seen other players do.
I know you think you just made a good argument for Russell, but examples like Jason Kidd and Brook Lopez are actually part of the opposite argument.
I have often used Kidd’s late development of a 3pt shot as an example of why we can only judge players on what they actually did, because when we go back and rate his career it would be pretty absurd to pretend he shot at that level his whole career. Sometimes guys will improve late in their career, e.g. Hakeem, and we ultimately have no idea why. Maybe everything just clicked for them, maybe the coach reached them, maybe the “system” was tailored to help them more. We can often speculate on the whys, but in the end it’s just speculation and we will never know. Anthony Davis shot the 3 superbly in 2020… but he never did it again. It would be extremely inappropriate for us to rate AD as though he had shot like that his whole career, and the same is true of Jason Kidd.
What if Kidd had learned to shoot earlier is just a different variant of “what if Shaq could hit free throws?” or “what if Sheed had a better attitude?” or “what if Walton had modern medicine?” The reality is none of those things actually happened, so we can only judge guys on what happened, by which I mean the skill set they actually demonstrated.
Russell never demonstrated a good offensive game, so we can’t give him one. We can allow that he would deploy the offensive skills he had differently today, and to that extent I think he would be helped. No question he’d be a great rim-runner. But that’s as far as it can go. Similarly, I’m sure Russell would have great timing on blocks, wouldn’t bite on fakes, etc. But we have no evidence he would make the complex reads and react with consistent split second timing in a modern D, because we have no evidence for it and that stuff is just hard for many modern players who grew up with it and are constantly practising it.
In Russell’s day his defensive role was mostly to run back in a straight line and stand in paint and wait there until he was challenged. That skillset can’t be extrapolated to “he could execute the modern defensive schemes” because the 2 skillsets have almost nothing in common. In many ways modern D is about ignoring your instincts, and executing a counter-intuitive gameplan. All KAT’s instincts in the Denver series would be telling him not to let the guy with the ball dribble right by him while he turns his back on him and rotates to Jokic, yet that’s exactly what he was doing. Today defenders need to know where all 5 guys are on the court, know all the complex plays the other team will run, understand the switches and rotations that come with each team’s action and the counter action that it will necessitate from each of them, they need to know exactly how much to hedge and stunt and when to go under and over the screen. Guys like CP3 will tell you they live on synergy, watching and studying the plays of the other team to master this, so they know all a guy’s tendencies and habits. It’s so far removed from what Russell was good at that I don’t feel we can possibly extrapolate his skills on D to these wildly different skillsets.
