Remembering coach Bill Russell [with correction]

Basketball legend Bill Russell died yesterday. He was 88.

Russell is being remembered as basketball’s greatest winner and, by some, even as the greatest winner in the history of major team sports. The case is easy to make: 11 NBA titles in 13 seasons, two NCAA championships, and an Olympic gold medal.

Michael Jordan is basketball’s other great winner. He won seven [correction: six] NBA titles in 15 seasons (13 of them full seasons), one NCAA championship, and two Olympic golds.

It’s worth noting, however, that Jordan’s NBA crowns were won when the league had at least 27 teams. When Russell’s Celtics won their first four titles, the NBA was an eight-team league. And in only two of their championship seasons did the league have more than nine teams. It had 14 in those two years.

Similarly, when Russell’s University of San Francisco team won their two NCAA titles in the mid-1950s, the tournament was a small-time affair, scarcely more prestigious than the NIT.

In 1956, Russell’s team made it to the Final Four out of a Far West regional that had only five teams. USF got a first round bye and then won two games (one of them against John Wooden’s UCLA).

By Jordan’s time, the NCAA tournament was the be-all-and-end-all of college basketball. Forty-eight teams competed that year.

We should also remember that the Chicago Bulls team Jordan joined in 1984 was a collection of mediocre, undisciplined players. The Celtics team Russell joined in 1956 had a back court with two future Hall of Famers (Bob Cousy and Bill Sharman) and a future Hall of Fame coach (the basketball genius, Red Auerbach).

But let’s not quibble about whether Russell is the out-and-out biggest winner in basketball history or should share that honor with Jordan. I want to focus instead on Russell, the basketball coach, a subject about which I’ve read little in the tributes to the legend that have rolled in.

The raw numbers from Russell’s coaching career tell this story: In eight seasons, with three teams, he won two NBA titles and 54 percent of his games. That’s a record of success nearly every pro coach would envy.

But let’s take a closer look.

His two titles came with the Celtics, for whom he still played. In his three seasons coaching Boston, the team’s regular season win total declined from 60 wins, to 54 wins, to 48 wins. On the other hand, the 60 win season marked a six game improvement from the season before — Auerbach’s last season as coach.

I don’t view the declining regular season win total as a reflection on Russell’s coaching. This was an aging, playoff-focused team. To Russell’s credit, he squeezed two more championships out it.

So Russell clearly was a successful coach in Boston. However, it’s difficult to know how much of the success to attribute to Russell the player and to the quality of the team he inherited.

Russell’s last coaching stop was Sacramento. It was a disaster. He posted a 17-41 record and didn’t make it to the end of the season.

As with his time in Boston, it’s hard know how much his Sacramento results reflect his coaching. The Kings were terrible before Russell arrived (though not as bad as they were under him). One suspects he walked into an impossible situation.

In my view, to get a good handle on Russell the coach, one needs to focus on his four seasons as coach of the Seattle Supersonics. And it happens that I had a seat (though not at ringside) for a small slice of that stint. A law school friend was a rabid Supersonics fan and we drove up from Palo Alto several times to see Russell’s Sonics play Golden State.

Russell is probably the best defensive player in basketball history, so it’s no surprise that he was a defense-first coach at Seattle. At his introductory press conference, he announced that his team would start guarding opponents the moment they stepped off the plane in Seattle. Thereafter, he drummed the message into his players’ heads, often by verbally abusing them according to several accounts.

The odd collection of players on Russell’s first Seattle team mostly reflected the defensive mindset of their coach. Standing out from the crowd was high-energy “Slick” Watts, with his shaved head (long before this became fashionable).

Watts wasn’t drafted at a time when the NBA draft lasted twenty rounds. But his college coach was Russell’s cousin, who became his assistant with the Sonics, so Watts got a chance to try out.

He proved to be Russell’s kind of player — especially on defense where he was relentless. Watts would become the first player in NBA history to lead the league in both assists and steals.

There was the late Kennedy McIntosh. He was one of the worst shooters I’ve ever seen in the NBA (36 percent from the field for his career), but another tenacious defender, and thus a Russell favorite.

Russell also seemed partial to John Hummer, who had starred at Princeton. At the NBA level, Hummer was an ordinary talent, but fundamentally very sound.

Spencer Haywood was the team’s only established star. He averaged 29 points per game for Seattle the year before Russell took over. Under Russell, his point production declined to around 23 per game and with a worse shooting percentage, probably due to working so hard on the defensive end.

Russell’s Sonics had another player who could have been a star — John Brisker. He had averaged nearly 30 points per game in the ABA and averaged better than a point every two minutes in the NBA.

But Brisker was a wild man with a terrible, violent temper. His nickname was “Heavyweight Champion of the NBA.”

This article suggests that Brisker intimidated Russell. Whether true or not, it seems clear that after seeing Brisker end a fight with a teammate with one punch, Russell didn’t like to be around Brisker.

Shortly after Brisker scored 47 points in a game, according to this account, Russell assigned him to the Eastern League, ostensibly to work on his defense. As the author notes, not much defense was played in that league.

When Brisker returned to the Sonics, he pleaded with Russell for playing time. Russell responded by telling him to “stay out of my face.”

Despite improvement on defense, Brisker rode the bench until being released. Later he would go to Africa. According to some, he became one of Idi Amin’s bodyguards. Being in Amin’s inner circle might have made playing for Russell seem like a picnic. In any event, after six weeks from his arrival in Uganda, Brisker was never heard from again.

Russell’s first Sonics team had two good outside shooters — Dick Snyder and Fred “Downtown” Brown, a poor man’s Earl Monroe but with a deeper shooting range, as his nickname implies. Snyder was another player whose shooting percentage declined under Russell (as with Haywood, likely due to playing with increased intensity on the defensive end).

Brown’s shooting didn’t decline under Russell, probably because he didn’t play intense defense. Russell would yell and curse at him, but, according to this source, the more Russell yelled, the more Brown ignored him.

How did this strange collection of players and their tyrannical coach fare. Pretty well. Russell’s first Sonics team went 36-46, an improvement of ten games from the previous year (but eleven games fewer than they won the year before in the last season of Lenny Wilkens’ first stint with Seattle).

In Russell’s next two seasons, the Sonics went 43-39. They made the playoffs both times.

However, in Russell’s final season as coach of Seattle, the record dipped to 40-42, with no playoffs.

With Russell gone and Wilkens, a terrific coach, back at the helm, the Sonics instantly became a championship contender. In the first post-Russell year, they lost to the Washington Bullets in the NBA finals. The year after that, they defeated the Bullets to claim the NBA crown.

On balance, Russell’s four-year stay in Seattle showed him to be a reasonably good, but flawed coach. His presence, focus on defense, and iron-fisted rule jump started the team. He brought a franchise that had been around for six seasons its second and third winning records and first two playoff appearances.

However, his dictatorial approach and penchant for demeaning players weren’t well suited for the long haul. Russell could only take the team so far.

To be fair, though, few NBA megastars have had as much coaching success as Russell. As I see it, only Larry Bird had more, but he never coached a team to a championship. Jerry West’s record is comparable to Russell’s. The list of megastars who flopped as coaches includes Bob Cousy, Elgin Baylor, Willis Reed, and Isaiah Thomas. And Michael Jordan has been a failure as team executive.

In sum, Bill Russell, considered the game’s biggest winner as a player, was also a winner as a coach, all things considered.

RIP

In