Bill Russell died this past weekend. Yeah, he played for the Boston Celtics, the most evil franchise in the NBA, but game must recognize game. While those Red Auerbach-coached teams were loaded, Russell was perhaps the best defensive big man of all-time. He dominated the middle of the key and made it nearly impossible for other teams to facilitate their offense in an era where there was no three-point shot. He was Wilt Chamberlain’s greatest nemesis, and his play led Boston to 11 NBA Championships. It’s unheard of to think of such dominance today, when expansion, better nutrition and medicine, more widespread development of the game, and better training has made three titles in four years a feat. The game has changed, sure, but these feats are still impressive even with the long passage of time.
Yes, the game is played at a much more sophisticated level today. If you somehow were able to pluck Russell from 1964 and doing nothing else with him but putting him on the hardwood with players today, he wouldn’t be as dominant. The man played in Converse Chuck Taylors, and medical care may as well have come down to a doctor telling him to “rub some dirt on it.” Black players today still face racial abuse, but nothing like what Russell had to endure playing in one of the most racist cities in America in Boston. However, if you somehow were able to pluck him, or Oscar Robertson, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Elvin Hayes, Bob Pettit, or Wilt Chamberlain out of their primes in prior eras into today, you would not expect them to come right in and play cold. The game has changed, but some guys would be good enough even if not up to their standards. Some would be just as good, and others might be better today. That’s why takes like these are so odious:
This isn’t the first time I’ve dunked on Bruenig for veering wildly out of his lane, which is some kind of weird half-progressivism sopped too heavily with communion wine to be worth a damn. He’s far too busy pretending he wasn’t using most of his online goodwill post-2016 to use as brake pads to usher in the era of the revocation of abortion rights to be blamed for having original thoughts about things the plebes like, like sports or music. The problem is there are people who purport to follow the NBA who come out with these asinine takes.
You see this kind of denigration of the past with every sport, and while it’s true in a technical sense, it’s tiring. It’s boring. It says absolutely nothing about the sport being described because if the players in the game aren’t getting better than they were in the past, that means as a people, we have stretched the limits not only of what can be done in a game, but how fine-tuned the athletes can treat themselves, both at the dinner table, on the practice field, and in the medical tent. Humanity is an imperfect species, and I doubt we’ll attain perfection in any lifetime, especially if the current climate trends hold and Earth turns into an uninhabitable sauna marble. It should be academic the players of today are better than they were 40 years ago, and those players were better than those who pioneered the game when said game was invented.
Why then do people feel the need to bring up the fact that Babe Ruth wouldn’t be able to hit a fastball from the worst team’s fourth starter or that Bart Starr would struggle against the worst defense in the league today? While part of it might be noble, at least in the case of players during times when various leagues were segregated, most of it is steeped in capitalist rot that wants to remind you that no matter what you accomplished in the past, you have to keep growing or else you will be worthless. Living in the past doesn’t pay the bills of today. It’s true. You should keep looking forward, but that doesn’t mean you forget the players who paved the way for those who came later.
It also ignores the fact that a lot of these guys did innovative things that inspired progress and kept the wheels moving. How many boys and young men watched Russell dominate in the paint and want to pattern their games after him, improving in the margins, and keeping the growth of the game going to where it is today? Hakeem Olajuwon inspired Joel Embiid, but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar inspired Olajuwon, and Russell inspired Abdul-Jabbar. Embiid will inspire the next big fella who wants to play in the key in the NBA, and the circle will keep moving. The point isn’t to compare these men to their forebears with derision or superiority but with gratitude. It should be viewed as an evolution chart for the game of basketball.
You cannot manipulate time to put Russell in the NBA today. Furthermore, to drop such takes on the timeline so soon after his death when Russell’s legacy was far greater than what he did on the court is borderline racist. Still, it’s time to put these silly arguments to bed. It doesn’t matter if Bam Adebayo could run 1964 Russell off the court, because Adebayo and all the bigs in the league better than him today don’t exist without Russell’s contributions. It’s time to block these fundamentally silly and retrograde takes from the discussion like Russell would block defenders driving to the hoop for a layup in his prime. They serve no purpose than to remind people that the past doesn’t matter when that attitude is patently false.