Wilt versus Russell: Bill Simmons Weighs In, Part Four

1960:

     Okay, enough of the side stuff. Now we're back to why I'm here. Remember, Bill claimed that the Celtics had “a slight edge” in talent over Wilt’s Philadelphia Warriors. Since I took us so far off course, let’s look at the 1959-60 regular season once more:

Maybe it wasn’t that the talent; maybe the Celtics just played better…?

Having spent my previous post decrying Never Define, Never Explain, I need to point out something about the table below:

     When I used this table previously, I counted everybody on each team; now, when I compare Russell and Chamberlain directly, I'm referring to every player except Russell and Chamberlain. Russell had two All-Star teammates, Chamberlain had one. Russell had two teammates who earned All-NBA first and All-NBA second team honors, Chamberlain had none. In 1960, Russell had six teammates who would go on to make the Hall of Fame, Chamberlain two.

Bill Simmons calls this "slightly more" talent.

     In a world where British understatement is the dominant idiom, I suppose one could say that Russell had “slightly better teammates” and get away with it. Oh, but wait - maybe he's right: just because Wilt had two HOF teammates and Russell had six doesn’t mean anything. Russell’s HOFmates could have been end of bench guys who barely saw the floor, right?

In the 1959-60 season, Boston played a total of 17,981 player-minutes. 65.2% of those minutes were played by Hall of Famers, minus Russell.
In the 1959-60 season, Philadelphia played a total of 18,169 player-minutes. 30.2% of those minutes were played by Hall of Famers, minus Wilt.

     I’d love to know how Bill Simmons arrived at the conclusion that the Celtics were only slightly more talented, but you know the drill by now. Say it with me, everybody! All together now!: Never Define, Never Explain.

     Anyway, I’m going to skip past ’61-’64 for the moment, since Bill concedes that “…Russell’s teams clearly had more talent than Chamberlain’s teams…” during that period. But he goes on to say that in 1965, the talent on each side was basically equal. So then we naturally move on to…


1965:

     Allow me to briefly share some details about the 1964-65 season as it relates to the San Francisco Warriors and Wilt Chamberlain. The 1965 season began with Wilt manning the center position for the Warriors, Wilt’s first NBA team. Obviously, they had moved west from Philadelphia, and things weren’t so smooth in the Bay Area. Whereas in Wilt’s first three seasons the team was strong and competitive (1960: 49-26, 1961: 26-33, 1962: 49-31), their first two seasons in Frisco couldn’t have been more different: 31-49 under Bob Feerick in 1963, 48-32 under Alex Hannum in 1964. It all came apart in 1965 – in Wilt’s 38 games as a Warrior that season, the team was 11-27 and riding a not-over-yet five-game losing streak. Wilt was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers (formerly the Syracuse Nats) for basically nobody: Connie Dierking, Paul Neumann, Lee Shaffer, and cash. (My guess is that Frisco was only after the cash and had to take the stiffs to get it)
     Bill Simmons’ tells this same story with a lot less detail, and willfully misrepresents two elements of the tale. Here is the first:

“As for the Warriors, they self-destruct and lose seventeen in a row, eventually trading Wilt for 30 cents on the dollar to Philly.”

Anyone reading this would conclude that this is how the sequence of events played out:

1. The 1964-65 San Francisco Warriors self-destructed right out of the gate
2. The 1964-65 San Francisco Warriors lost seventeen straight games
3. The 1964-65 San Francisco Warriors then trade Wilt Chamberlain

But that’s not what happened. When Wilt was traded away, the Warriors had only lost five in that seventeen game losing streak – less than one third of that streak was over with when Wilt left. This, folks, is outright dishonesty.

So is this, from a footnote:

“At one point, [the ’65 Warriors] were 10-34.”

     As bad as it was for the ’65 Warriors, it was never that bad (at least not when Wilt was there). Again, the team’s record when Wilt left was 11-27. 11-27 yields a .289 winning percentage, which is terrible but well ahead of 10-34 and its .227 winning percentage. I don’t know where Simmons got 10-34 from – considering what he has done with the facts so far on this topic, “making it all up” seems like the likely source.
     This is an embarrassment which should really be damaging to Simmons’ credibility, but The Audience - more on The Audience later - isn’t much interested in the reality of the 1965 San Francisco Warriors. Sadly, Bill’s word is quite enough for them.

     What I would normally do here is post the NBA standings for the season in question, but it hardly seems fair in this case. Russell’s Celtics have an enormous advantage in terms of continuity - moreso than in most seasons - in this particular season, so we don’t learn much from comparing the Celtics to the rebuilt-on-the-fly 76ers.
     Instead, what I will do is this: I will make the 1965 Warriors as strong a team as is plausible. I will share my method so that, if you disagree with what I do, you can at least see how I got there. Before I take even one action to remake the 1965 season, let me make the necessary assumptions which will guide my process:

1) If the 1965 Philadelphia 76ers were good enough to take the Boston Celtics to a seventh game, they must have been better than a 40-40 team, right? Now, I am on record as saying that series results can be deceiving, but in general there’s something valid about them. Playoff teams with a record near .500 are usually out in the first round, so if a .500 team wins one series and pushes the champs to the limit in the next, they probably weren’t as bad as their record.
2) If Wilt Chamberlain had been a member of the 76ers from the start of the season, they would have had a better record. Maybe not, but it’s plausible, right? In Wilt’s first five seasons, his team made the playoffs four times, with the worst of the four winning 58% of their games.
3) Chet Walker, Hall-of-Famer. He isn’t a Hall-of-Famer as I write this, but he has a strong case: according to basketball-reference.com’s Hall of Fame Probability index, Walker is the second-highest ranked player among HOF-eligible players (behind Jo Jo White). Though I may be completely botching this explanation, any number above .500 makes a player’s election to the HOF more likely. Walker’s number is .6984, which places him at #83 among all NBA players – retired or active - throughout history. With sixty-five seasons behind us, wouldn’t any player in the top 100 seem like a worthy Hall of Famer? So to strengthen the 1965 Philadelphia Warriors a bit more, Wilt Chamberlain now has two Hall of Fame teammates to work with. (Russell had four HOF teammates in 1965, but at least we’ve closed the gap)
4) Connie Dierking and Paul Neumann…are now gone. Since Wilt was traded for the two of them (and Lee Shaffer, who didn’t play one minute for the Sixers), we can start the season by giving their 1829 minutes to Wilt (which is only slightly more than the 1743 he played in San Francisco).
5) Let’s fix the records. We’ll exempt Boston from this, since a huge chunk of Simmons’ argument rests on the career head-to-head records of Wilt and Russell (we’ll get there later), but if we accept, in general, that the 76ers would be better with a full-time Wilt, we need to adjust their record.

Now that we've looked at the plausible changes we can make, let’s begin:

     The smallest, most natural step I can take here is to simply improve Philadelphia’s luck. The 1965 Philadelphia 76ers were 22-23 when Wilt joined the team and 18-17 with him. But if I improve their luck just a little bit…let’s see what happens. Here is a breakdown how the Sixers fared with Wilt on board:

     Now, if I simply change the wins and losses, Philly’s record with Wilt now stands at 20-15. Over a full season, that amounts to a 46-36 record, which would have been good for third-best in the East and fourth-best overall (Without, of course, accounting for the changing records of the other teams yet). But I can’t do it completely since I chose to exclude Boston from this process, so now we’re at 19-16, or 43-37.

Of course, I can take this same approach to the 45 games before Wilt, right?

     So they were a little luckier before Wilt came along. Well, one thing you can put on Wilt in this regard is his horrendous free-throw shooting. Maybe they would have fared better than 4-6 in two-possession games if he wasn’t so bad at free throws. As it happens, his complete 1965 season from the line was among his worst: excluding his 1970 season (when he only played 12 games due to injury), Wilt had only four worse seasons than 1965, and eight better. However, Wilt shot them pretty well (for him) after the trade – he only had five better seasons than his 35 games with the Sixers.
     In order to figure out how I can improve the Sixers in 1965, I need to next go over the head-to-head results. And to keep things plausible, I can take those two-possession losses against the four teams with worse records than Philly and convert them to wins. That places Philly at 21-14 after the Wilt trade; that’s .600 ball there, which over a full season would have been good enough for a second-place tie in the East (with Cincinnati) and third-best overall.
     Okay, I guess the next step is to do what I’ve just done and apply it to the teams above Philly in the standings (minus Boston, of course). I had to modify this one and here’s why: Seventeen of their thirty-five post-Wilt games were against Baltimore, Detroit, New York, and San Francisco - the worst teams in the league. Four of those were a one-point win and three two-point losses. It’s not a huge stretch to suggest that Philadelphia could have won all three of the losses while preserving the win. But against the good teams (Cincinnati, Los Angeles, St. Louis), Philadelphia played thirteen games, five being two possession games: a one-point win, a one-point loss, a two-point loss, a four-point win and a four-point loss. One cannot expect to reverse your luck in the losses only (we are dealing with the best teams in the league here), so I’ve reversed only one result – the two point loss to Cincinnati. Now what do the 1965 Sixers look like?

In TV parlance, this is known as a cliffhanger; results tomorrow. :D