Bill Russell on Offense: Filling in Bill Simmons' Blanks

     Since Bill decided to disprove the myth that Bill Russell wasn't a very good offensive player by way of discussing his passing and athleticism, I'll once more step into the role of Simmons' unpaid researcher and help him along. After all, he couldn't have gone into much detail on this, having only 700+ pages to work with.
     In the first place, we can look at Russell’s field-goal percentage as one indicator of his offense. It’s easy to imagine Russell, playing with the sort of high-scoring teammates he had, to be a guy who converted a high percentage of his shots just by hanging out near the rim for lay-ins or dunks from Bob Cousy passes or from gathering missed shots. Well, as it happens, Russell was the one missing quite a few of his shots: true, in his first four seasons, Russell ranked highly in FG% - 5th out of 42 qualifiers on 1957, 4th of 39 in ‘58, 2nd of 50 in ‘59, and 4th of ‘62 in 1960. Then, as the sixties moved along, Russell slipped well down on the FG% leaderboard. After that fourth season, Russell only finished in the top 40% of all qualifiers twice; in three of his final four seasons, he couldn’t crack the top 60%.
     Of course, Russell was undoubtedly putting back many of his own misses and those of his teammates. If they were tracking such things then, we could see that Russell’s true shooting wasn’t as bad as all that.
     At least, not from the field. Move this discussion to the free-throw line and Russell was nearly equally inept as his nemesis, Wilt Chamberlain. Russell was only 5% better than Chamberlain, making 56.1 of his free throws compared to Chamberlain’s 51.1. Granted, Russell was better in the playoffs and Chamberlain worse, but both were bad: 60.3% for Russell, 46.5% for Chamberlain. Russell was an unqualified liability at the end of games, but 1) the Celtics were usually far ahead at the end of games and 2) Russell wasn’t nearly as relied upon to score as was Chamberlain, so he was less likely to see the ball at the end of games.
     To find out where Russell stood as an offensive player during his era, I looked at centers who played in the years 1957-69 and played at least 350 games. Twenty players met those two standards. First, we’ll look at field goal percentage. Russell ranked 7th, and not surprisingly, five of the six players above him began their careers in the sixties. Only four of the thirteen below Russell began their careers in the sixties.
     Next, we’ll just quickly touch on free throw percentage. Eighteen players ranked ahead of Russell, just one below. (Guess who?)
     Russell didn’t shine at points per game, but he didn’t really have to. Nevertheless, his scoring average was a solid 7th. And Russell was indeed an accomplished passer, second on a per-game basis to Wilt Chamberlain.
     My question though, to wrap up discussion of Myth #2: Who the hell was out there saying that Russell wasn’t a very good offensive player? (God, what possessed me to critique this book?)