Wilt versus Russell, Part Six: The Regular Season Matters

     In my quest to refute Bill Simmons ludicrous claim that Bill Russell didn't have more talented supporting casts than Wilt Chamberlain, I have supported my counter-arguments with the results of each regular season. I figured that I needed to take a moment to explain myself a in little more detail. You see, there is a strange idea lingering, like the stench of a foul cheese, around basketball discussions in recent years. That idea being: The Regular Season Doesn't Matter.

     Those of you who believe in the Irrelevant Regular Season remember all of those occasions where the best regular season team didn't win. You remember 52-win Miami beating the 60-win Dallas Mavericks, the 47-win Rockets beating the four teams on top of the 1995 standings, the Sonics, Mavericks, and Spurs losing in the first round as #1 seeds. You remember the 2010 Celtics struggling through the season before nearly winning the championship.

That’s the thing about exceptions - they stand out. For those of you who don’t believe that the regular season is meaningful, here are the facts:

• Sixty-four seasons of NBA basketball have been played through 2010
• The team which owned or co-owned the best record in the NBA in a given season won the championship 31 times
• The team which owned or co-owned the second-best record in the NBA won the championship 19 times
• The team which owned or co-owned the third-best record in the NBA won the championship 6 times
• Every other place – fourth or lower – won the championship eight times

So if you have a problem with my lending weight to the regular season, don’t complain to me. Take it up with NBA history.

     I’d like to take some space here to discuss a statistic that some of you, perhaps many of you, aren’t familiar with. It’s called SRS – Simple Rating System, developed by the folks at basketball-reference.com. SRS is similar to Point Differential, but it accounts for the strength of the opponent. For example, here’s a hypothetical basketball team, the SRS Eagles. In their first two games, the Eagles win against teams with SRS ratings of 1.0 and 0.5. The margin of victory was ten points in each game. The Point Differential was +10.0 for the two games, but the SRS rating for the two was +7.5. This occurs because beating the weaker team by ten is equivalent to beating the stronger team by five, so the Eagles get 10 rating points for beating the 1.0 team by ten and five rating points for beating the 0.5 team by ten. 10.0 + 5.0 / 2 = 7.5 – Simple Rating System.

(In the very likely event that I butchered the explanation, just click on this post to get a better understanding of SRS.)

     I don’t know how Bill Simmons really evaluates talent – sometimes he emphasizes results, sometimes he emphasizes awards, sometimes he cites anecdotal evidence...hard to say. I think regular season performance is a very important indicator of how talented a team is, and SRS is one effective way to show just how exceptionally talented Bill Russell’s Celtics teams were.

Some things to take away from this chart:

1. If you award five points for first place, three points for second place, and one point for third place, you get: Boston 57, Syracuse/Philadelphia 76ers 26, Philadelphia/San Francisco Warriors 11, New York and St. Louis 7, Los Angeles 5, and Cincinnati 4. Yes, you are reading that right: Boston garnered just under half of all the available award points by themselves.
2. In the seasons Russell and Chamberlain played together (1960-69), Boston garnered 48 points, Wilt’s teams (Philadelphia/San Francisco Warriors 1960-64, Philadelphia 76ers 1965-68, Los Angeles Lakers 1969) got 15.
3. Boston’s SRS in the Russell era fell below 5.0 only four times. By contrast, every other team listed here exceeded 5.0 only three times, with the 1968 Lakers earning an SRS of exactly 5.0.

That was the NBA in the old days, with many fewer teams. What has the last thirteen seasons looked like?

Applying the same award points system from above: San Antonio 33, Los Angeles Lakers 13, Sacramento 12, Dallas 10, Boston and Cleveland 8, Portland 6, Miami and Orlando 5, Phoenix and Utah 4, Chicago, Detroit and Minnesota 3.

Boston captured 57 rating points from 1957-69 based on SRS. From 1999-2011, the Los Angeles Lakers, Sacramento Kings, and San Antonio Spurs won 58 rating points on the same basis. These three (really two) teams were 9-2 in the NBA Finals; Boston was 11-1 during the Russell era. I don’t see how Boston did this without an enormous advantage in overall talent, relative to their competition. Consider: from 1999 to 2011 no #1 team enjoyed a greater gap than +2.0 in SRS points. From 1957-66 Boston was #1 in the SRS and in those ten seasons, the #2 got within +2.0 only twice. How does it not follow that Boston’s talent was head and shoulders above everyone else nearly every season?

Before I leave SRS:

• In 1968, Wilt’s Philadelphia’s 76ers earned an SRS of 8.0, which was double the SRS of the Celtics. It was the one and only time Wilt’s team enjoyed a clear advantage in talent. By contrast, the Celtics enjoyed a +4 (or greater) SRS margin over Wilt’s teams five times.
• In 1966, the Celtics’ SRS was 4.3, the 76ers’ SRS was 4.2. Dead heat.
• In 1967, the 76ers’ monster season of 68-13, the Celtics did pretty well to get 60-21. The SRS ratings were even closer: Philadelphia 8.5, Boston 7.2 – this was the third-closest SRS gap from #1 to #2 in the 1960’s.
• The 1969 Lakers didn’t make the SRS top three in an unusually crowded top of the standings, but their SRS was 3.8 – only 1.6 SRS points behind Boston.

To sum up: on five occasions, Boston had clearly superior talent to Wilt’s teams. In 1964 and 1969 Boston was superior, but not decisively. In 1966, the talent was level. In 1967, Wilt’s 76ers were superior but not decisively, to the Celtics. In 1968, Philadelphia was clearly superior to Boston.

So that’s +7=1-2, in Russell’s favor. Pushing that grade in Wilt’s direction makes it +5=4-1, still in Russell’s favor.

This is my sixth post on the so-called #1 Myth of the Chamberlain-Russell debate, and I have an entire chapter on this subject to get through. So in my next post, I'll wrap this up.