The greatest winner of all time, Boston Celtics Hall of Fame big man Bill Russell, had such a profound impact on the sport of basketball that Yahoo Sports’ Ben Rohrbach named a metric designed specifically to measure Russell’s sort of greatness.
Updating it for the second straight year since its creation in 2021, Rohrbach recently released the 2022 version of what he has dubbed the predictably-titled “Bill Russell Scale” to help us take stock of how greats across eras are currently stacking up against one another. “Russell’s accomplishments also do not fit neatly into a statistical box,” writes Rohrbach. “He was not an all-time great scorer, and PER fails to properly capture the impact he clearly had.”
“This is why setting him as the gold standard makes so much sense,” adds the Yahoo analyst — and with that, let’s see where Celtics alumni stack up in 2022.
It’s no coincidence this team has the most retired jersey numbers with 17 banners hanging alongside them as of Oct. 2022. https://t.co/Pr3nTuee7t
— The Celtics Wire (@TheCelticsWire) November 6, 2022
No. 70 - Chauncey Billups
No. 68 - Bob McAdoo
No. 66 - Dave Cowens
No. 65 - Kevin McHale
No. 62 - Bill Sharman
No. 55 - Ray Allen
No. 48 - Sam Jones
No. 46 - Robert Parish
No. 44 - Dominique Wilkins
No. 43 - Paul Pierce
No. 42 - Gary Payton, Sr.
No. 24 - Bob Cousy
No. 20 - Kevin Garnett
No. 17 - John Havlicek
No. 9 - Larry Bird
No. 8 - Shaquille O'Neal
No. 1 - Bill Russell
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