Mike G wrote:jbrocato23 wrote:
There is an added difficulty in evaluating pre-1970s players using individual stats because the information we have is so limited.
Agreed. I've seen Russell ranked out of the top 20 by some 'advanced stats', so I have felt OK with him ~ top 10 by my numbers.
But that same limited information makes us guess as to what his personal impact is on a team. The Celtics weren't like other teams. The '69 version was a shadow of their early '60s juggernaut.
In a given year, OReb% and TO% may vary by 20% among teams. Turnover
differential -- I don't know how to search for this -- would have an even greater range.
The
early-60s Celts were so dominant, even with their subpar FG%, that it's possible or likely they stretched those limits by quite a bit. Russell may have been the great O-Rebounder of his day, but the TO disparity might have been as great or greater an advantage, and mostly others' doing.
Whether one assigns to
other Celtics more offensive or defensive credit, they were apparently highly skilled, relative to their contemporaries: They got all-league and all-star berths. Ball handling is a pretty basic skill through which to gain an advantage.
Mike, it's not exactly clear to me why you aren't fully engaging the argument. The fact is that team possessions can be estimated with sufficient precision to subsequently address many of the questions that are on the table, regarding the role of Bill Russell in the Celtics' success.
Again, to estimate possessions, the only piece that is missing from the formula is TO minus OR. This
difference is necessarily a very small fraction of total possessions, and we know the remaining terms "exactly". In 1973-74, the first NBA year where these data are shown, as stated, the NBA average of the ratio of (TO - OR)/Possessions is 0.05 with a range of about 0.025 (IIRC). So, for my fake data (related above) I chose 1.03, on the (rational) belief that, if nothing else, a Bill Russell team was pulling down (proportionately) more offensive rebounds than the average team.
Might this ratio have been significantly lower, implying an offense that was more efficient and a defense less so, thereby suggesting (at the macro level) that there was more to the Celtics' success than just Russell, the defensive specialist? Yes, it is possible, but wildly implausible. You have to go all the way to the 1981-82 season, for example, to find the first team (Houston) where TO equals OR.
But even then, to diminish the centrality of Bill Russell, the argument would then have to be that it wasn't more ORs that lowered the ratio because that would obviously largely redound to the offensive credit of Russell, changing the story a bit but not the conclusion. Instead the just so story would have to be that across the entire dynasty, with different ball-handlers throughout, the Celtics were simply amazingly consistent at not turning the ball over (and furthermore such that none of the credit for this could be attributed to Russell). As such, and only as such, can you tell the story that maybe a bit of the Celtics' superiority owed to offense that couldn't be also credited to Russell. And such a story is wildly implausible. (And as if to corroborate, those 1981-82 Rockets, they led the league that year in offensive rebounds.)
And finally a few comments on the claim that it was the early 1960s Celtics teams that were the juggernaut years of the dynasty. This is to a certain extent true, but basically misleading when it comes to the issue of appraising the central role of Bill Russell in the team's success. Per my assumptions (and cherry-picking the end years to make the early 1960s look the best possible), this is what I calculate as the average "ORtg - DRtg" for the three "phases" of the dynasty. For the early years, 1957-59: +4.5. For the glorious, middle six, 1960-1965: +5.9. And finally for the end of the era, 1966-69: +4.6.
Two things leap out from these numbers. First, as noted, the middle years were the best. But second, there wasn't much difference between the three phases at all. And more generally, the Celtics, though having achieved a dynasty that will never be repeated, weren't historically dominant in terms of this most conventional measure. (But that is opening up a can of worms I am not intending to open.)
The larger point, for the question at hand, is that looking at this average net rating obscures the absolutely central role that defense (i.e. Russell) played in generating the team's success. I mentioned previously how it was the life cycle of Celtics/Russell defense that tracked/defined the Celtics success, and here are the numbers that illustrate it. DRtg compared to the NBA average, 1957 to 1969: 3.1, 3.5, 4.0, 4.3, 6.3, 6.9, 7.1, 9.6, 8.0, 5.3, 3.1, 2.7, and the anomalous 5.0 in the final year. Perhaps a bit clearer than the truth, but probably not much.