I think most of us have an internal conflict when thinking about the “best” or “greatest”, and that conflict being if we consider them to be synonyms or draw a line between statistically best and greatest winner.
One can be statistically dominant but not a winner, or one can win a lot but not have great stats. The best players have both, but there is enough lopsidedness in those who were statistically the best but not great winners. Wilt, statistically, is probably the greatest basketball player who ever lived, but Russell is the greatest winner. How you weigh the importance between stats and winning creates that conflict between putting someone like Wilt over someone like Russell. We think that best stats should win and when they don’t, it bugs us
On the flip side, I don’t believe “winning” is a skill on its own. While I can’t say everything would have played out exactly the same, if you put Wilt in Russell’s place on the Auerbach Celtic teams, you can’t tell me they wouldn’t have won their share of championships. Wilt could rebound and block shots, too.
2 of Russell’s championships came as he was coaching the team. And one of those, er, both of those he won against Wilt.
Also, don’t really buy the “Russell had better teammates while Wilt had shit” argument. Russell had Havlicek and Cousy (but neither for their whole careers - he won 5 championships without each), while Wilt lost two championships to Russell while on a Lakers team that had Elgin Baylor and Jerry West on it. Three of the greatest 15 players in NBA history… and they get stopped by Russ and Havlicek. While Russ was pulling double-duty as coach.
Twice.
IMHO, the Russell v. Wilt argument was settled a long time ago on the basketball court. All time Russell is 85-57 against Wilt, a .599 winning percentage, 4-0 in all star games, and 2-0 against him in the NBA Finals.
Unless they’re playing one-on-one, though, that’s really not how it works. It’s fair to point out that Wilt had some great teammates, too, but nobody dominated the league like the Celtics of that period, and there were years Russell had five and six and seven Hall of Famers as teammates.
And All-Star games? Seriously? Bill Russell has an incredible record, and you’re trying to use exhibition games to prove a point? Jeez. That’s like saying he won nine NBA Championships and also runner-up for Mr. Congeniality Boston '51.
We all understand how many rings he won. Nobody is going to tell you “nope, that isn’t true; he didn’t actually win those.” The book is closed on whether or not he did win, as it turned out. What we’re wondering is, is it possible - is it literally possible – that Russell’s winning those rings didn’t happen because he was better at “winning” than Wilt was? That game seven of the 69 Finals or whatever actually could have gone the other way if some other schmuck did or didn’t make some free throws or step out of bounds or whatever, and that we’d still be in the same universe and those two players were still the same players, in other words. Is there any possibility that it’s both true that Russell won more, and Wilt was the player that helped you win more? Or is that something that by definition couldn’t happen, because Russell won more?
Look, Wilt lost to Russell when Russ had Havlicek and Wilt had West and Baylor. And while Russell was coaching the team. Regardless of the silly all star comment, isn’t that all you need? Russell won against his greatest challenger almost every single important time he had to… including all star games.
To use an analogy, Jordan and Pippen beat Stockton and Malone twice, and while Malone turned into an all-time numbers beast, nobody is claiming that the Mailman is better than Jordan even though he ended up with better rebound and point numbers than MJ. That would be silly.
But that’s what I’m hearing here. “Oh, all Russell did was win championships but really, Wilt had better numbers.”
It could be. But, if you have to make that argument for your player to be considered “better”, isn’t that… odd? You’re essentially saying “My guy did more to help his team win than the other guy, but the other guy kept winning more.” This might be a fine argument if you’re comparing role players (say, Dennis Rodman vs Robert Horry), but both of these men were the respective leaders of their team(s).
In this case, the guy who helped his team win more is the guy who won more.
Like I said earlier: is winning a skill? Or a characteristic, even? One person can just “be a winner,” and they’re a winner because they’re a winner, and somebody else isn’t a winner because he’s just not a winner, their abilities be damned? Or is that maybe a gigantic oversimplification touted by people who want to see sports as a morality play or a fairy tale instead of a complicated human endeavor where the outcome depends on a lot of different things, and one you can’t properly understand just by starting at the end and working backward.
It’s not all you need to know because you didn’t mention Sam Jones, K.C. Jones, Tommy Heinsohn, Bill Sharman, and a lot of other guys. The Celtics had at least four Hall of Famers on every team from 1954 (pre-Russell) through 1969. Many years, they had a full starting five of Hall of Fame players and then two or three more on the bench! And in the interest of being fair, it’s true that winning all those titles helped make those guys stronger HoF candidates. But - while I don’t think you were trying to mislead anyone - that’s a good example of using numbers to misleading effect. “Both teams had three Hall of Famers!” is technically true, but if you keep counting you see one had three and the other had eight, and that does make a difference.
There are some good points in here and some real garbage. Karl Malone was one of the best power forwards ever. Full stop. He was great before those series against the Bulls, and he was still good after. If you’re saying all he did was put up good numbers to no effect, that’s flat-out wrong and you debunked it in your own post by pointing out that he went to the Finals twice. I think the Jazz set a record for consecutive seasons above .500 while he (and Stockton) were on the team. He was a great player on some great teams. As it happens, he lost to a better team led by a better player.
As for the fact that he ended up with more points than Jordan… yes, that’s an example of why some people are suspicious of counting stats. (Who argues that a forward was better than a guard because the forward had more rebounds, though?) Almost everybody agrees Jordan was better than Malone. But if all you could say was “Jordan won six championships, so he’s better than Malone,” people would be right to say that’s a shitty argument. Robert Horry played for seven championship teams, and nobody thinks he’s better than Jordan, do they? Do you? There are tons of arguments that Jordan was better than Malone based on his scoring average rather than total, his all-around game, and defense. But again, we’re arguing about two of the best players ever. The guy who loses that argument isn’t exactly garbage.
You may be hearing that, but nobody’s saying it. Everybody agrees Bill Russell was great, and almost everybody put him on their personal Mount Rushmore. Saying he’s better than Wilt just because of the championships, though, is a bad argument.
Not too sure why the hostility. Obviously championships matter in this (Mt Rushmore) discussion because it would be damned silly to call someone (say Charles Barkley) one of the four-greatest w/o a championship ring, right? So the number of rings matter, and I don’t
You have two players from the same era. One put up gaudier numbers, the other won championships. One got traded three times, Auerbach would have never traded Russell. Before Wilt joined the Lakers there was a team vote as to whether they wanted him on… and he lost. Do you think West and Baylor would have turned down a chance to work with Russell? One lead his teams (even all star teams, Marley) to consistently beat the other, while the other guy couldn’t lead a team with 3 of the greatest 15 NBA players of all time to victory against Russell.
So, yes, championships matter, especially when they’re head-to-head.
In case this is somehow not getting through, nobody is arguing that Bill Russell is anything but a very great player. And you can make some perfectly good arguments that he was a better player than Wilt. “He’s better because he won more championships” isn’t one of them. I mean, you put Wilt ahead of Tim Duncan on your Mount Rushmore even though Duncan has four titles and Wilt won two.
It is true you never hear anybody say Sam Jones was better than Elgin Baylor even though Jones has, just to pull some random comps out of a hat, a higher Win Shares per 48 than Kobe Bryant or Hakeem, to say nothing of Baylor. But of course that cuts both ways when what we’re talking about is whether Bill Russell gets more credit than he deserves for the rings he’s got.
And how many of those players would have made the HOF if they hadn’t been playing on the same team as Bill Russell?
The Celtics were the highest scoring team in the NBA the year before Russell was drafted, but only had a +0.7 point differential in PS/PA. Russell joined the team in December (he played in the Olympics, held in Nov 1956) and the Celtics not only led the team in scoring, but also in defense for a +5.3 PS/PA. Russell not only helped his team defensively, he also helped them be a better offense team as well.
Winning counts. No one would dare even suggest Labron as a top 4 player if he hadn’t won 2 championships in the last 2 years. We’d still be remembering his sulking in the 2010 playoffs in his last game with the Cavs, when he refused to be a part of the offense, and played off the ball for the second half.
Much like my memory of Wilt, taking himself out of Game 7 in the 1969 finals with 6 minutes left, and his coach being so disgusted that he didn’t bother to put Wilt back in as the Celtics eked out a 2 point victory for championship #11.
Everybody agrees he was really, really great. Still.
Is that because he wouldn’t be one that good, or is it because a lot of people think “HE JUST WON” is a real argument? I’ll admit that people would be less receptive to the argument if he retired without winning a championship, but that doesn’t mean the argument is false. It’s not; he’s a four-time MVP already and he’s put up some of the best seasons by anyone ever.
And this brings up a related point in that over the last few years we heard over and over that LeBron wasn’t a a winner and didn’t come up big in the clutch, and this was some kind of personal failing. Then he did and he won two titles and everybody forgot about it. He wasn’t a winner, and then all of a sudden he was. So again: are people just winners and not-winners? If so, how can somebody go from one to the other? Or can we acknowledge that this is a team sport and there are things other than one player’s makeup or character or winning-ness that figure into what happens.
Basketball is, at it’s best, a team sport. And a “winner” is a great player that makes his teammates better. The Celtics during the Russell years were a collection of role players. Russell, a top scorer in his college years, sacrificed that recognition in the pros to make his team better defensively and offensively. He not only blocked shots, but worked on directing many of his blocks. He not only rebounded, but when he came down for the ball he often found the right man to start the fast break. This allowed the Auerbach to utilize KC Jones as a defense specialist, Tommy Heinsohn as the gunner without a conscience, Don Nelson as the trailer on the fast break, and Havlicek as a swing-man coming off the bench, and sometimes going small and quick and sometimes big at guard. I don’t think any of those players, save Havlicek, would have made the HOF if they hadn’t played with Bill Russell. Even Bailey Howell, who you mentioned, would have missed out on the HOF, if he hadn’t come to the Celtics, close to 30, and revived his career at the end.
In the 1969 NBA finals, the Lakers were the more talented team. Wilt and West were still close to their peak years. Baylor, although still dangerous, was nearing the end of a great career. On the Celtics, only Havlicek was in his prime. I went to a playoff game in the Spring of ‘69 and sat across from the Celtics’ bench, and noticed that there were a half-dozen players with blood-stained ace-bandages one or both knees. The medical procedures 45 years ago were more like Civil War doctors than to today. And in 1969, the Celtics were a very, very old team, literally on it’s last legs.
And yet the Celtics won vs a great Lakers team in 1969, so I’d say that “winning” counts. Russell was the smartest player of his time. He played the game at a deeper level than his opponents. And adjusted from year to year, from game to game and especially within each game and made his team better than the other team, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
