Doctor MJ wrote:Vote: Bill Russell
So I'll say up front that I expect Michael Jordan to take the #1 spot again, and that really doesn't bother me in the slightest. He's an excellent candidate. I do consider Russell's case a bit stronger though, and I intend to speak to that in this thread more to do my best that everyone gets why he's so impressive in general.
Since though people have already said a lot of great stuff (awesome to see such heavy hitting, great start to the project), it doesn't really seem that beneficial to lay it out like a blog post that assumes people know nothing. Key points for me then:
1. Analysis of Russell's GOAT candidacy starts for most of us by comparing him to Wilt Chamberlain. Most in the world see Wilt as the more impressive of the two, and I used to as well. Most here seem sold on Russell over Wilt so I won't belabor the point other than to emphasize that this is a really big deal. While most of you know that I have some pretty chippy criticisms of Wilt, his physical talent would be an outlier in any era, so besting him proves quite a lot.
I'm not sold on it. But those who are have to Chamberlain lower that takes away from what that achievement is. And in what sense besting him?
Doctor MJ wrote:2. People often see Russell's size as an issue. I point out how he handled Wilt as something to reassure them. I'll also point out though that there's no real reason to be terribly concerned with Russell's size based on what we see in today's game. The best defenders are always interior help defenders, and that requires length, quickness, and intelligence. I would submit Russell should be given the edge in intelligence over any similar player in the history of the NBA (we can talk about Larry Bird, etc, but he's a different type of player obviously), that people should be very careful about giving any other big a quickness edge over Russell, and that realistically there are diminishing turns relating to length once you get past a certain point.
I still look at Russell as clear cut the archetype for how you'd build a defender today, in other words.
How did he handle Wilt (to your mind)? (The pro-Wilt argument put elsewhere in the thread would say he was outscored more or less 2-1 and outrebounded and clearly outshot, whilst noting George Kiseda's comments on their matchups). But I'm not particularly an advocate of the size thing. I would perhaps argue against his (era) portability in another way though. Specifically, if he was a low usage, low efficiency scorer in his age, why would we assume he'd be anything else in another age.
Doctor MJ wrote:3. Once I got past Russell vs Wilt, I started thinking about Russell vs Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. For a good while I favored Kareem based on a perception of two-way impact and longevity.
The longevity thing is actually a pretty trite argument for me though at this point. When we talk about players who played what they considered a complete career, we don't really have any reason to think they couldn't have kept on contributing value to their team if there'd been an urge to do so. Russell won 11 titles, it's surely a complete career.
Russell said he felt burnt out. And whilst people undersell how good that last Boston team was on it's record (see SRS, explain it by looking at injuries, saving Sam Jones on low minutes etc) it wasn't a team that looked particuarly better than the Knicks over the season (Boston beat them 4-2 in the playoffs, but scored just 7 more points over the series, winning two games by a single point) and a number of other teams were close. Put simply with the Knicks improving, I don't see Boston as likely to win the title the next year (that's even retaining Jones and Russell at the same level and Howell not aging either) and that probably harms rather than helps Russell's legacy (which isn't to say it would make him a worse player or make his career worse in my book). And the "complete career" thing is a neat argument, but bluntly I don't see any reason to ignore Jabbar's extra years.
Doctor MJ wrote:What about the two-way impact? Two things to think about:
1) Remember those years smack dab in Kareem's prime where his teams did nothing special.
2) Understand how drastically off the charts Boston's defense was when Russell was at his apex.
I look at these things, and I give Russell the impact edge despite Kareem's clear edge on offense, and really this is what roughly holds true for me about Russell vs other in general. In other words, don't reply to me looking to defend Kareem here, because I'm not knocking Kareem really. The notion that a superstar can always turn any team into a contender is clearly a myth, and people would do well to remember Kareem when they look to knock others.
I'm not claiming that Russell a clear cut exception to this rule, but his impact on opposing defense was like nothing we've seen since.
Okay but look at Russell's defensive supporting cast. Havlicek, Sanders and K.C. are all legendary defenders. Kareem's teams did nothing special on O because he was the only good offensive player in the first couple of years in LA. To me Boston were off the charts on D because they had Russell and a great coach, and a degree of continuity not found in the free agency era, and other great defenders. Of course Russell made a large defensive impact on arrival just because others introductions were more staggered it doesn’t mean they weren’t having an impact too.
Doctor MJ wrote:4. "But could Russell do something like that now?". I'm willing to say I think he'd be less effective today. I think he'd still be the best defender, and I think his offense would shock people with how much better his numbers would look. However, I don't have a problem saying that I'd probably look at LeBron James was the better prospect were they coming out now for this league.
Should that knock Russell out of contention for the top spot? i don't think so. I do not see a GOAT list as something that should simply ask "How would they do now?". Let's take a clearly absurd example of where such thinking would take you:
"Yeah, Lincoln was great during the Civil War, but that doesn't give me any reason to think he'd be great against a financial crisis, and it's not like slavery's an issue any more."
I'm not advocating for Russell based simply on dominance over his era - you have to figure in degree of difficulty as well, and this is why I largely ignore earlier eras this hype up on the GOAT list. Quite frankly, if Russell just dominated in those late 50s-early 60s years, it would be a major issue for me too.
However, Russell kept on dominating. Leagues coming of age follow S-curves, like a growing business does:
The thing is that Russell's career spans the rapid skill growth era. Unprecedented change in that 13 years, and there basically was never any answer for Russell no matter how the change occurred. That's just crazy. Basically, I think it's naive to assume other players could have thrived throughout all these changes like Russell did.
As before I'd question how he'd play well on O now if he didn't in his own time. But time-transporting players is of fairly small to no importance.
On the S curve (if you believe it) I think that becomes a case for Wilt. Because he was the guy collaring MVPs when the league was better). And if Philly doesn't have a rash of injuries in the '68 conference finals (Boston had injuries to Siegfried and Sanders but not at the same time and iirc many of their minutes just went to Havlicek so not such a substantial downgrade overall) both NBA history and people’s perceptions of both players change.
Doctor MJ wrote:5. The battle of the "perfect" careers: Russell vs Michael Jordan.
I think that in the end, those who put Russell at #2 behind only Jordan, are likely to see Jordan as the 2nd guy with a perfect career, but since he did it in a later - and presumed more competitive era - tie goes to him. This makes sense to me, except that I don't see Jordan's career as the same type of perfection.
If we make a list of most consecutive NBA titles, the list looks like this:
1. Boston 8
2. everyone else 3
I would assert that this distinction should be seen as night & day. I understand that people have a tendency to want to essentially give Jordan a 6-peat, but in both 3-peat it was clear that the Bulls were fading toward the end, and clearly from what we saw in '95 the Bulls don't get back to winning titles without making some personnel adjustments.
Getting into retirements and related issues: Jordan's 3 retirements are a joke. Yes there were unusual circumstances the first time, and yes he'd eventually have to retire a 2nd time as a result. 3 retirements though is a sign of a restless soul, particularly when you look at some of those details - the baseball, the stupidity of his approach to Washington.
In short: What makes Russell truly stand out over Wilt, is also what makes him stand out over Jordan. Russell was a guy who could truly indefinitely just focus on the task at hand and do what needed to be done. He wasn't a guy staring across a fence thinking about the grass being greener...and that's the reason why he could win 8 titles in a row. I'm not going to say he's the only basketball player in history who had the brain to do that...but Jordan wasn't one of those guys.
The problem here is, the argument that Jordan’s Bulls couldn’t have made it an 8-peat essentially acknowledges how absurd it is to note this as a player accomplishment. “In both 3-peat it was clear that the Bulls were fading toward the end” Well no ones saying he would win in ’99. ’93 is the question. So the question is was there anything wrong with MJ in ’93? The answer (despite the Olympics) is no (he was better than the previous year). So by saying they wouldn’t win in ’94, you’re surely acknowledging that that would not be due to a fall in MJ’s play, but circumstance (not that I'd necessarily say they wouldn't win in '94 with a full summer's rest and the arrival of Kukoc and Kerr). And so you acknowledge team achievements are to a very large degree circumstantial and, to the degree that that is the case, of little importance to player evaluation.
Jordan’s first retirement is the (only) one that is problematic. It’s unusual to the extent that people have concocted the idea that the commissioner privately suspended the league’s license to print money. Still given the circumstances (his father’s untimely death, speculation about it and about connections to his gambling) it is perhaps understandable that he wanted to leave that world. That said it’s slightly unusual that you grant Russell the “He’s won and entitled to go out on top” thing but not MJ. Yes MJ had less titles but in a larger league and arriving on just as talented a team, and with what I think was generally already considered a better career resume (combined with the personal circumstances outlined above). The second retirement was about the right time and the third will be covered below, but suffice to say I don't think playing a bit more at an old age should hurt him.
There is also the point that maybe the reason Russell never “star[red] across a fence thinking about the grass being greener” is because he was in the greenest field.
Doctor MJ wrote:6. On the "perfect" note, I've seen people also talk about Jordan as "the perfect player". He wasn't. Not saying anyone else was, and I'm not saying he was imperfect because he wasn't the GOAT at everything, I'm saying he has clear myopic limitations.
The issue is simply that first and foremost, Jordan was a volume scorer, and the typical mentality of the volume scorer is to focus on their individual attack rather than the team attack. If you're good enough at your individual attack relative to your teammates and your opponents, that might be good enough for you to be the most valuable offensive player in the world, but to the extent that Jordan is the archetype of this, he's also showed us the limitations here.
Remember the Dream Team where the USA's offense operated in a state of passing ecstasy that would make Pop gasp...except for one man still chucking as hard as he could. Barkley shots 76% TS, the team shoot 64%, Jordan shoots 49%. Everyone got the memo except Jordan, who of course was going around in practice emphasizing "I'm the man now, it's my game, it's my team.". People talk about that like it's impressive, really it displays a fundamental cluelessness about how basketball works. Had the other guys not had such great attitudes (Magic first among them), we might have had something much like an Iverson-Marbury type of team like in 2004.
I get that the huge success of that team makes many think that Jordan would have changed his way if the team were truly struggling, but...we saw how Jordan reacted in Washington. There he came in their already knowing it was unwise of him to try to volume score. That his only purpose was to help other guys come into their own. But he just couldn't help himself. He went back to his old ways despite the fact his skills weren't anywhere near good enough to achieve anything this way, all the way continuing to "lead" with a brutality that as we saw there, was fully capable of simply reducing his teammates into vegetables. It's stupid, plain and simple.
All of that though, while it's the most egregious flaw in his mentality, doesn't actually change very much the direct he had on his NBA career. I think though it's crucial to understand these limitations to appreciate how fortunate Jordan was in the team that got built around him in Chicago.
Remember that before Phil Jackson, Jordan had never led anything beyond a mediocre team offense. While this in and of itself isn't damning - human basketball players have human limitations - it's crucial to understand that it's much more difficult to make a decent offense insanely good than it is to make a bad offense decent. The Bulls were on a plateau until Jackson.
Now, I'm not actually trying to say Jackson deserves all the credit, or that Jordan deserves no credit for adapting to the new scheme, but this was an offense whose major competitive advantage was at least as much offensive rebounding as it was Jordan's scoring. Ponder that while remember how Jordan played on the Dream Team and in Washington.
This type of customized offense architecture is not something that a Magic or a Bird needs in order to make beautiful things happen on offense, nor is it what Russell needed on defense. Jordan was extremely fortunate to finally get into the right situation, or else people might forever question whether his individualist game could truly lead to team excellence, because it sure as heck was no given that it would have happened.
Okay so your prime example of his flaws is the Dream Team. Really? I don’t generally say garbage time (most stats, I think, are important) but when you’re winning by 40 a night?
His flaws in Washington, as you say didn’t really affect his career. This was an odd combination of restlessness, vanity and perhaps an FU to the Bulls for not giving him power (and ownership) in the organisation. It isn’t something that really alters his career value. But fwiw, who should have been taking those shots? Tyronn Lue, Courtney Alexander? Kwame? Rip Hamilton posted his 2nd highest usage percentage with MJ (and he was better off screens than as an iso creator). The next year maybe Larry Hughes could have got a few more shots, though Jordan’s usage was way down.
You can say offensive rebounding, and whilst I’m not sure about apportioning credit (though based on a vague recollection I looked at basketball on paper and found “So is rebounding important to winning games? Of course. Is it as valuable as shooting, getting to the line, or controlling the ball? In the NBA, it doesn’t appear to be so” p92. Whereas the “most important [of the four impacts] seems to be the first [impact on shooting percentage from the field]”p96), Chicago were good in multiple areas (’91 1st in efg%, 3rd in turnover %, 4th in oreb%; ’92 2nd, 2nd, 5th, ’93 8th, 1st, 1st). Then there’s questions about cause and effect, did MJ forcing double teams and help D facilitate bigs getting rebounding position. For the 2nd three-peat the oreb factor can be attributed to Rodman, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he was the net giver of offensive goodness, as his low usage low efficiency shooting meant the other players had to do a lot just to get the team to where it was from the field).
I think the triangle probably helped, but more at the margins. Jordan got better teammates and started winning is the big thing. Maybe you can reverse engineer offensive impact from the team level, but presently I’m not wholly convinced (particularly for non-pgs).
Per 100 that's 34/15/6 on 61% TS.
I almost changed my Russell vote the moment I saw those numbers.
