PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY DAN DAO / GETTY IMAGES
Properly measuring the greatness of Bill Russell, the legendary Boston Celtics center who died Sunday at age 88, has always been a challenge in our modern, metrics-obsessed era of NBA analytics. Russell’s titles, 11 as a player, two of which were also as a coach, are unmatched in professional basketball history, of course. But as ring counting has fallen out of fashion in favor of increasingly sophisticated individual stats, it can be difficult to contextualize the legacy of a player who averaged 15.1 points per game had no official numbers for his famous shot-blocking ability. and achieved most of its victory in an NBA with fewer than 10 teams. Even less quantifiable is the far-reaching social impact of the league’s first Black Hall of Famer, a man whose accomplishments off the court rivaled those on the hardwood.
And yet, in many ways, Russell created the NBA as we know it today. These mismatches—between iconic works and old film reels, glowing testimonials and sketchy numbers—make one thing clear: As big as you think Bill Russell was, he was probably even bigger.
Take the official record of your career. Russell’s scoring average ranked just 30th among his contemporaries. His 22.5 rebounds per game are mind-blowing, to be sure, but they’re surpassed by his friend and rival Wilt Chamberlain’s 22.9. By more modern metrics, Russell may look like a good player, but not even a particularly great one: His career player efficiency rating of 18.9 is tied with DeMar DeRozan, who ranks 114th among all time Basketball-Reference.com’s win shares think more of Russell, but even for that category he barely makes the top 20 (total WS) or top 30 (WS per 48 minutes) in NBA history .
It may be hard to square that individual resume with the fact that Russell’s teams seemed like they just had to win trophies as soon as he joined them. At the University of San Francisco, Russell led a program that had been below .500 before it to national championships in 1955 and 1956, earning NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player honors in the the first of those efforts and UPI Player of the Year honors at the University of San Francisco. second Russell hoped to carry that success into the NBA after being taken second overall in the 1956 draft and then traded to the Boston Celtics, a team without a championship in their history.
The pre-Russell Celtics had their share of big names, from coaching Red Auerbach to a lineup featuring Bob Cousy, Bill Sharman and Ed Macauley, but Boston was only six games over .500 in both seasons prior to Russell’s rookie year. . In 1955-56, the Celtics ranked third out of eight NBA teams in offensive efficiency, but only sixth in defense, and were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. In Auerbach’s first six seasons at the helm of the Celtics, his team had never reached the NBA Finals, finishing only with an above-average defense (1951-52).
Russell changed all that as soon as he made his NBA debut. With their new starting center logging 35.3 minutes per game, the Celtics’ defense improved from the third-worst in the NBA to the best, producing the best record in the league. In the playoffs, they swept the Syracuse Nationals to make their first NBA Finals appearance, then swept the St. Louis Hawks in seven games to win a championship in Russell’s rookie year. While Cousy won league MVP honors, it was clear that Russell was the driving force behind Boston’s transformation into a defensive-minded champion.
This theme would be reinforced year after year for the next decade. With Russell anchoring their lineup, the Celtics won 11 of a possible 13 titles from 1956-57 to 1968-69, finishing with the league’s No. 1 defense an incredible 12 times in that span. (The only exception was 1967-68, when Boston finished second to Chamberlain’s Philadelphia 76ers.) The secret of basketball’s greatest dynasty was that it didn’t have a particularly powerful offense, despite all the Hall of Fame names. Fame of his training. Instead, it was the greatest defensive dynasty the game has ever seen. We once calculated that each of the five players who had played for the best defenses in NBA history (relative to league average) were part of the Celtics dynasty, with Russell’s average team suppressing offense with 6.1 points per 100 possessions relative to league average.
Then there’s the visceral beauty of Russell’s game, which can’t be captured by any statistic, only grainy video and contemporary accounts of his brilliance. How exactly would you measure Russell’s uncanny ability to strategically block shots to stay inside, prompting a fast break for his teammates to turn into easy points, or, more memorably, for him to control and then gracefully slide 94 feet with just a few? do you race?
And long before NBA analytics departments recognized that blocking shots didn’t equate to good defense — big men going to every blocked shot can allow the offense to pump fakes or grab offensive rebounds more easily, Russell knew he was keeping his powder dry. To paraphrase a famous Russellism, what mattered wasn’t necessarily blocking the shot, but defenses thought it would.
“The fact that Russell didn’t try to block everything just rubbed in salt [opponents’] hurt,” Mike Prada wrote in 2020. “Russell mastered the art of staying on the floor, making sure he was always within the line of sight of an offensive player.”
Other great defenses have come and gone over the years, including the San Antonio Spurs under Tim Duncan, perhaps the only other dynastic defender who could challenge Russell’s reputation. And many clubs have won multiple championships in leagues with more teams than the Celtics had to beat, a criticism that was sometimes used to discount the value of titles won in Russell’s era. You could even argue that ring count is lazy shorthand for greatness for most players throughout NBA history. But in Russell’s case, those knocks ring hollow.
For one thing, Russell’s pioneering impact as a defender is still felt today, in an NBA that prioritizes versatile, “switchable” big men. Nearly 60 years and countless seismic changes after Russell first stepped on an NBA court, Anthony Davis, then the Naismith Men’s College Player of the Year out of the University of Kentucky with an unpolished offensive game, praised shot-blocking instincts (and non-shot-blocking instincts) reminiscent of Russell. As Hall of Fame coach Bob Knight said, “[Anthony Davis is] a young Bill Russell. … And Bill Russell was by far, and always will be, the most valuable player in the sport.” That’s a testament to Davis’ prodigious talent, no doubt, but it’s also a testament to Russell’s staying power, and a suggestion that would still dominate in today’s NBA.
And in Russell’s case, championships speak even more than individual attributes. They tell the true story of a player who completely transformed a franchise in his image, turning it into the most prolific dynasty in basketball history.
They also run hand-in-hand with Russell’s publicity for the struggles of black Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Russell marched for civil rights on numerous occasions and was in the crowd for his “I Have A Dream” speech Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. After teammates Satch Sanders and Sam Jones were refused service at a coffee shop in Lexington, Kentucky in 1961, Russell joined them in boycotting a game against the Hawks.
“We must show our disapproval of this kind of treatment or else the status quo will prevail,” Russell said afterward. “We have the same rights and privileges as anyone else and deserve to be treated accordingly. I hope we never have to go through this abuse again… But if it does, we won’t hesitate to take the same action again.”
Three years later, Russell was again at the center of a historic act of protest. Along with Oscar Robertson and other stars, Russell led a faction of players at the 1964 All-Star Game that threatened not to play unless NBA owners formally recognized the players’ union and granted them a plan to pensions The strike eventually worked, as commissioner Walter Kennedy reluctantly acceded to the players’ demands. And Russell began again in 1966, succeeding Auerbach to become the NBA’s first black head coach, all while still bouncing around downtown Boston.
In all three cases, Russell advanced where the game was going, and paved the way for future generations of the NBA. Decades later, the NBA remains the most socially conscious professional league of any major American men’s league, continuing to drive progress in racial justice, and its union has arguably become the most powerful of all sports And while the NBA’s record of racial diversity in coaching lagged behind its reputation, Russell’s coaching success forced white front offices to realize that black coaches could win, opening the door to a series of legends. All of these developments can be directly traced to Russell’s outsized influence off the court, in addition to his success on it.
Russell’s status as a prominent and outspoken black athlete and coach came at a huge personal cost. He suffered untold abuse from fans, reporters and basketball organizations dating back to his years in San Francisco, and developed a reputation as a cold and aloof person, rather than a happy warrior, because of his refusal to to bow to racist forces both within the NBA and wider American society. Sportswriters mockingly referred to him as “Felton X” for his…