Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell have played each other 143 times in their careers, playoffs included.
To put that into perspective.
Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan played 82 games (a full regular season).
Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas played 65 games.
LeBron James and Steph Curry played 51 games (not including the play-in).
Magic Johnson and Larry Bird played 37 games.
EDIT: made a mistake saying “have played” as if they’re still active players. Can’t fix it so it’ll stay.
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Wilts playoff series record against teams that don’t have bill russell on it is like pantheon level. Like he’s 1-7 against Russell’s Celtics and 17-4 against everyone else
which is why when people put Wilt on their all-time list but leave off the dude who consistently beat him, I think it's crazy
One of the arguments that people pose is that Russell had more help. He generally did have more HoFers on his teams, but if I asked you to name them, the only names people are going to bring up are Cousy, Sam Jones, and Havlicek. A lot of those HoFers are there because they were role players during the Celtics dynasty.
Russell also didn't play with all of those guys concurrently, so it's not like the Celtics were uber-stacked like the KD Warriors for their entire run. Plus there were a couple years where Wilt had the better team and still lost to Russell. Wilt played several seasons with Jerry West (Top 15 imo) and Elgin Baylor (Top 30 imo). Russell played with Cousy and Sam Jones (Top 40 and 50 imo), and then Sam Jones and Havlicek (Top 40 imo). In those Lakers seasons, Wilt's team was better on paper.
Havlicek should probably be higher since he also had 2 post-Russell titles. But then Wilt also played 4 years in Philadelphia with Billy Cunningham who was putting up 22-13-5 numbers and made All-NBA First Team 3 times after Wilt left to LA and Cunningham became the #1 option.
I love Hondo and have no issue taking him higher. However, I wanted to account for the weaker NBA post-Russell, as well as the other HoFers like Dave Cowens and JoJo White.
Yeah Havlicek won after Bill but also worth pointing out that it was after the Celtics drafted another MVP in Dave Cowens
I feel like hal Greer was better than Cunningham during wilt's tenure in 76ers. He was much older tho and billy will eventually get better than he ever was.
People use the "more help" because how much Bill Russell defense isn't measurable from the box score. But the Celtics were the best team in league because of Bill's Focus on defense making them by far the best team in the league on defense not offense.
Exactly. Just to add to this his defense turned into offense. He would block shots to himself and get rebounds then pass full length of the court for layups.
Celtics won more championships after Russell too.
crazy people remember tommy as a the homer on the sidelines instead the guy who beat bill russell for ROTY and never passed the ball (cause he made so many shots).
That's cause Bill didn't play like half the season. Cause he wanted to play in the olympics.
Top 40 for sam jones is wild lol. He's probably in the 80-100 range
Cousy was 40, Sam Jones was 50.
One, that helps my point even more. Two, he was named to the Top 50 so I figured I'd keep him there, but I could see him being closer to 60 or 70.
They can name guys on the Lakers, very few fans can name anyone he played with before.
Easiest way to debunk that is the fact that Russell played in 19 elimination games in his career. But he won 17 of them
They weren’t steamrolling their opposition, Bill was just a pure winner when it mattered most
I mean honestly though NBA maths don’t add up like that. A player can have a rating of 78 but because he knows the habits of other team players and will pass/cut in a way that benefit a team, he is worth more than 78 to that team.
And then you can have a team of 3 players that average 85, 1 player at 94 and the rest 82 and they can beat a team with 1 player at 98, the rest at 82 average. So the 98 player is viewed as historically worse than the 95 player. Plus the above mentioned synergy and intelligence, the possible range of a player’s rating is even more uncertain, and much more or so when you consider other players, coaching staff, etc.
Then you have attitude stuff, like Duncan willing to work with all players and can probably coexist with more superstars than any other superstars. How do you quantify that? And you have Jordan’s killer mentality. But maybe in a different situation and different teammates, that would backfire too? Like some psychological qualities could be 99 on one team and 78 with another group. How do you quantify those?
When it comes to the GOAT debate, everything is just a guesstimate.
you only have to see what the Celtics did right before and right after he was there. They had no where near the same success without him and with their teams mostly the same.
When wilt played with Baylor, Baylor was not as good as Havlicek. Throwing out big names is just dumb. Wilt played with rookie Nate Thurmond too!
People also leave out the fact that Russell’s defense literally was the engine that drove those teams. He obviously had help but if he’s the best player on the best team it shouldn’t knock him as much as it does to casual fans.
He also played at minimum 8 more mpg than any of them, usually to 10+.
Wilt's career did not start with the Los Angeles Lakers, he played a decade against Russell before ever moving to LA. Shit, they only played ONCE in the postseason when Wilt was with the Lakers. There's ONE instance where Bill won with a worse squad out of their 8 playoff meetings and in that instance, Wilt got hurt and couldn't continue during Game 7.
Most people can't even name the players Wilt played with before he joined the Lakers, meanwhile Russell played with all-time greats of that era, like Cousy, Havlicek, Heinsohn and Sam Jones, heck, there were years where he had them all at the same time. There's even a guy like Bailey Howell, who was a 5-time All-Star before ever joining the Celtics, then joined them when they were in their last few runs and again put them over the top. That's like when the Warriors added Boogie after they won their title in 2018, but instead of having a torn Achilles, Howell averaged 20 ppg with a 113 TS+.
He didn't play with all of them for their entire run, but he did have AT LEAST 3 HoFers who were at some point All-Stars by his side every year (1966 being the only exception), while at times having 4-5. The 1963 Celtics were one of the most stacked rosters in the history of the NBA with Cousy, Havlicek, Jones, Heinsohn and Russell, all Top 75 players in NBA history.
Bill Russell was fantastic, but he was not individually better than Wilt Chamberlain for a second of his career. He was a better leader and probably a better person to be around, maybe he was even more clutch, but the only reason this Wilt vs Russell debate even exists is because one guy had WAAAY more help for 90% of their battles and because NBA fandom has an obssession with which player won in a team sport, even if the guy who won should've always done so because his team was miles better.
One could also argue that being able to play next to Bill is what freed them up to play at a hall of fame level. That's why I like these discussions, this whole thing is a web we're trying to untangle.
Celtics fan downplaying Bill Russell’s 11 allstar teammates 😂
It's a team game and the Celtics were an amazing team. So it wasn't just Bill vs. Wilt.
But yes, Russell was great, no doubt about it.
People back then knew though. Russel won mvp during wilts 50 ppg year. It’s only the stats that would make it look different than it really was. All sports fans need to do better at trusting the players of the past. If they said russel was better they are probably right.
To me, this is the #1 argument in favor of Russell. The people who watched the games say Russell was better.
In 40 years, if the stats people say Draymond Green is better than Steph Curry they would be wrong. We're watching the games now, we understand what is going on. I'm going to trust the people that watched then.
Steph is a great example. His stats are really good, but not compared to Westbrook or harden. If you only looked at stats you would easily say those were the best guys out there, but we all know the impact that steph has is so much greater than his stats will show: we all know he is the best, we don’t need the stats to back him up.
That’s like saying Steph > LeBron no?
People bring up that Russell had more help, but that's really only part of the argument that should be made. The major strike against him is that he had so much help on the offensive side of the ball that he almost entirely focused on defense and barely contributed on offense. His defensive vs offensive win shares are as lopsided as Steve Nash in the opposite direction. Russell was capable of contributing and was a solid passer and could score in the open court or off cuts and putbacks, but his scoring was so low that he never finished in the top 5 in pts/36 on his own team and was outside the top 10 for more than half his career, again on his own team and teams were smaller back then. People compare him to Wilt because they played each other so much, but they were not remotely alike as players. In terms of play style and team role, his closest comps are Draymond, Rodman, and Ben Wallace. Obviously he's way way way better than those guys, but he was essentially a defensive specialist with limited offensive contributions just the same. To quote Russell himself, "this game has always been, and will always be, about buckets" and he just wasn't a bucket getter, hence the disrespect. Personally, I have them right next to each other all-time at 4/5 behind MJ, LeBron, and Kareem.
I think both of them are way underrated on the all-time lists, and if you're using ring counting as an argument at all then Russell needs to be your GOAT. But Wilt not only didn't have the team that Bill did, he also didn't have ANY of the stability. Everytime he got a good coach who knew how to use him and players around him, the organization completely crumbled. If he had Hannum as his coach and an organization that wasn't at risk of crumbling every year, he wouldn't have won 12 titles. But neither would Russell.
I think Russell deserves his spot, but this logic is really reductive. Russell’s teams and coach massively outclassed Wilt’s cast. It’s remarkable Wilt could even bring those series as far as he did
It’s a team game
you can’t blame wilt
Watch them play against each other. It will become clear.
Yes, that's why people consistently put Robert Horry at the top of their all-time list.
Bill Russell has the accolades but he doesn’t have the stats. He averaged 15 points per game for his career, which is ranked around 20-25 in the entire NBA when there are 8 teams in the league. In a 32 team league that would be like ranked 100th out of 450ish players. If he averaged 25 a game I think a lot more people will be putting Bill on the list.
Sooner or later people are going to have to leave off both Wilt and Bill from the top 10 lists. The game was just too different in that era.
It's just no point in trying to accurately rank players when they played practically a completely different era. You're going to have to rank them by tiers, or pre and post merger or things like that
Yeah I'm not gonna have to do that
Not that hard to compare players relative to the era they played in
"People are going to have to leave off both Wilt and Bill from the top 10 lists" (because they never saw either of them play, and really don't care about players which they don't see as "theirs").
What part of top 10 list was unclear?
Russell is in my top 2 and he ain't 2
Guessing Robert Horry is your number 2 then?
He consistently has a better team.
Why do people call him 'the dude' when the guy was just the center of a fucking super power roster? I'll never understand. In the highest pace era Bill Russell never score 20ppg in a single season. Meanwhile his 5 teammates were consistently above league average scorers and an amazing facilitator in Cousy early in Bill's career. He's played with several players capable of putting up 20ppg+ seasons on above average FG%, with multiple in the same year.
Sorry, I'll always respect Bill especially for the period of time he became a player coach but his teams were basically that eras level of KD-Warriors on steroids.
And people wonder why the NBA keeps limiting defense to promote scoring when you have fans like this.
How many titles did Cousy win before Russell arrived?
During Wilt's historic and much memed 50 PPG season he somehow finished second for MVP...
To Bill Russell.
Bill Russel gets disrespected, but that fucker put the Lakers through a decade of hell.
How in the world is he “disrespected” this man is in top 10 and at times top 5 lists playing on a super super stacked Celtics team before free agency was allowed. His team dominated the era so hard that he catapulted up all time rankings because of championships. He obviously played a major role in them, but they had a crazy roster regardless of him and there was no way to have other player move around back then.
yeah, but without Bill Russel Wilt Chamberlain would have spanked the celtics 11 years in a row. They needed Bill Russel Bill Russel didnt need the celtics to be great.
not to mention people who were actually there and watched the games said russel was better.
Yeah, some people don't even know how to spell his name.
Then you look at Russell, who only lost 2 playoff series in the entire 11 rings worth of his postseason.
To add to that, from the start of his career until his knee surgery in 1969 he lost a single playoff series (in his second season) to a team that wasn’t Russell’s Celtics
19 games alone in 1962
There were only 9 teams and they play 80 regular season games.
You play each team on the other conference 8 or 9 times (compared to 2 times today)
You play each team on the same conference 12 times (compared to 3 or 4 times today)
Someone hook me up with the full 82 game "season" that was Kobe vs Duncan. Would be super cool to see.
https://www.landofbasketball.com/games_between/kobe_bryant_vs_tim_duncan.htm
Imagine if they were teammates. Bros would probably win 15 rings. Somebody do a 2k sim.
That’s only like 4 more for Russell which is crazy
He didn't even play 15 seasons, so it's more like they win 10 rings together, but Bill still has 2 more overall
Russell won 11 championships in his 13-year career, so it would really only be two more for him.
The hardest road
Probably easy enough on basketball-gm
15 champ;ipnsikp[ ringhs
Not realistic, KD.
"have played" implies that it is not strictly in the past...is there something I don't know about the basketball afterlife?
Their basketball rivalry presumably resumed on 7/31/2022.
"Man, you lived a long-ass life just to avoid me." "Yeah and now I've gotta beat your ass again quick because I'm having coffee with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X afterward."
yugioh lore
How do you make this post, but not put their head to head record for convenience
https://stathead.com/basketball/vs/wilt-vs-bill-russell
For anyone else wondering that doesnt feel like clicking, Bill's up on both counts, 57-37 regular season, 29-20 playoffs
It's 29-20 in the playoffs, but that doesn't seem to illustrate the fact that Russell won those series 7-1
True. Here's a link to a good breakdown posted up by r/JoJonesy a few years ago that gets into some more detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/nbadiscussion/comments/ohseao/examining_russell_and_wilts_playoff_matchup_record/
People like to talk about how weak the league was back then when there were many years of only 8-12 teams, but this stat highlights the flip side to that. With so few teams, you play the majority of your games against the best players and teams of your era, which is something that should be pointed out more often yet is completely ignored.
Imagine the NBA like that today...
You take the top 5 or 6 Western Conference teams.
Add the Top 2-3 in the East.
Take the best 3-4 players of all the teams that don't make it to that top 8 and give them a place in the Top 8 teams' rosters in place of the bench players with the least usage.
Now everybody fights for their lives.
grabs pop corn
Exactly what I’m saying dude that shit would be off the hook, it would be like watching May/June basketball year round.
Exactly. There were only around 100 NBA players back then. Compared to around 400-500 today.
Imagine you remove 300 NBA players today and compact the talent to 8 teams. That would be an extremely concentrated league. According to ESPN player rankings, Mitchell Robinson is the 100th best for the 2023-24. He's currently a starter for the Knicks, but if there were only 8 teams, he'd be a benchwarmer.
Obviously there's more talent today. The only point being made here is that the claim that the past era was "less competitive" than today is a shortsighted take. Yes, Bill played with a lot of HOFers. But so did Wilt, with Paul Arizin, Tom Goal, Hal Greer, Chet Walker, Billy Cunningham et al. It just happened they're not part of a dynasty so they're not quite household names like Bob Cousy, Bill Sharman, Tom Heinsohn, Sam Jones, John Havlicek et al.
The logic doesn't hold up because there are a lot more people playing the game today. In the same way college admissions are always getting tighter, the NBA is always becoming more selective, and the player pool is growing a lot faster than the league.
Yeah, you have to factor in population growth and the game becoming global. Back then they were really only drawing from a pool of 150 million US citizens. Now we're drawing from a pool of 8 billion. The difference between 150 million and 8 billion is about 8 billion.
So not only do you lose half of the current best American players, but you lose all of the international guys. No Jokic, Embiid, Giannis, Luka, Wemby, Sabonis, etc... You would lose like 90% of the active top 100 players.
That's not even considering the improvements in nutrition, medicine, and training. Just from a raw population perspective the talent level of the NBA would plummet.
Can we 2K Sim an 8 team league?
The rosters you get from this are WILD. Like if you take The Ringer's top 100 list and draft 8 teams from that, the worst team in that league has:
Steph Curry
Victor Wembanyama
Domantas Sabonis
Tyrese Maxey
Pascal Siakam
And the best team is just ridiculous.
Nicola Jokic
Kevin Durant
Tyrese Haliburton
Jaylen Brown
Paolo Banchero
How did you get these rosters?
Just went down that ranking list as if it was a draft order. 1, 9, 17, etc. to the "best" team, and 8, 16, 24, etc. to the "worst"
Comment deleted by user
They could only meet in the finals and 2 games a year in the regular season. Everyone else mentioned in the post played in the same conference for 5+ years.
Yeah - 19 of those 37 are playoff games.
Cross conference rivals just don't play a lot. I bet half of the Lebron-Curry number is from Lebron's time in LA alone.
Yeah, their rivalry wasn’t based on regular season games. It was built on the ‘79 ncaa championship and multiple nba finals
22 of the 50 are Cavs Warriors finals which is a wild number of times for 2 people to play each other in the finals lol
I love the way the title is in the past-present tense, as if we can look forward to more Wilt/Russell matchups in the future.
You never know.
Wilt died 25 years ago.
I don’t subscribe to that sort of negativity.
Allegedly. I hear he faked his death and is currently crashing in Tupac's hidden mansion in Jamaica.
Comment deleted by user
Grammar and spelling skills today are far beyond salvation lol
Yeah, this was really ruining my day tbh. I might’ve done something unspeakable if it weren’t for you fr. We really must put an end to the improper grammar in this holiest of sites. Someone PLEASE think of the CHILDREN.
Pretty sure Bill isnt gonna suit up again and Wilt died 25 years ago I think its safe to used past tense here.
Pretty sure Bill died in 2022 So it’s safe to say both men are dead
Lol yeah they had his number on every jersey somehow forgot that already.
Dead serious about going to Itchy and Scratchy Land
source?
Wait I thought he died in a South African prison in 1992
There where only 8-10 teams back in the 60s. Who else would they play.
Willis Reed, Nate Thurmond, Walt Bellamy
Dave Bing, Rick Barry, Bob Pettit, Oscar Robertson
Jerry Lucas, Bob Pettit
Said the guy who doesn't know basketball history
Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell have played each other 143 times in their careers, so far...
“Have played” makes it sound like they’re still active. Just say “played” and this sounds much more professional.
There were only 8 teams in the NBA when they started and 14 when Russell retired.
I'm not even a LeBron stan, but shrink the NBA to 8-12 teams and LeBron would have maybe double digit titles by now. You can say Russell's ring count is wildly inflated without disrespecting the talent or importance of the old legends. I'll go so far as to say that even the rings won by MJ, Bird, and Magic are a lot cheaper than current rings when you consider smaller league size and especially the almost complete lack of foreign stars.
Imagine the NBA without Wemby, Jokic, Luka, or Giannis. Path to a ring for the American players like LeBron, Tatum, and Curry would look so much easier. It kind of says it all that LeBron has been an elite, god tier player for ~20 years and has actively stacked his rosters for over half that time, and will probably finish his career with "only" 4 rings.
I don't think anyone will ever match Russell's ring count and it may be a long time before anyone wins 5 or 6 again.
I don't think you're thinking about this properly. You wouldn't lose those talented players, they would be attacked on the same team. LeBron's success would depend A LOT on who he was playing with and how stacked the opponents were. Luka, Tatum and Curry might all have been on the same team, if you were to condense the league.
Look at Wilt. LeBron is a much better teammate that Wilt was, but Wilt was easily the best player in the NBA until Kareem showed up, and Wilt only managed to win 2 titles.
That said, I always say it's foolish to compare eras. The league was less than half as big as it is now, they played at a MUCH faster pace, no 3pt line, etc.
I don't think you're thinking about this properly.
In that era with a lot less participation in the sport, there is no Luka. There is no Jokic. Most of the elite players in the league are Thanos-snapped out of existence.
So yes, the concentration of players would be higher, but there would be fewer players. Think of it as the difference between splitting $100 8 eight ways and $1000 30 ways. There is more dilution in the latter example, yet the payout is still higher.
There are far more people on the Earth today than in the early days of the NBA, and FAR, FAR more people playing basketball. That equates to a much deeper player pool, which cancels out the dilution from gradual NBA expansion.
To put it another way, the good teams in that era sometimes had hall of fame-level players coming off the bench.
Side question: Anyone have more games against lebron than Paul Peirce? 69 games.
Dont think so
OP failed English class. Why are you speaking in the present tense as if they’re still playing?
143? They must have really loved playing each other
“Have played”? Like it’s ongoing? Like they might unleash one more on us from beyond the grave?
This is what I mean when I say that 8 teams in the league isn’t the diss people think it is. Bill had to play Wilt on a Tuesday, Oscar Robertson on Wednesday, Pettit on a Thursday, and West and Baylor on a Friday.
Day in and day out, you can’t rest against bad teams in the 60s
Obviously there are advantages as well, but it’s not like it was easier in every way
I think it's a safe bet that they're not going to play again in the future, so prob could've excluded "have" in the title.
I like that OP used the present perfect tense, subtly implying Wilt & Bill may have another game against one another.
Less teams in the league, the more they had to play each other. Something that gets lost when people talk about their competition. They competed against each other 20 times per year at times
Teams had an ungodly familiarity with each other in that era. That’s the most impressive thing about the Celtics run
Less teams
Fewer
The night is dark and full of terror
Unmore
Disextra
fun fact: both are correct
Interestingly, Magic and Bird played in 3 finals against each other, which went to 6, 6, and 7 games, for a total of 19--more than half of all their games played against each other. And it could have been substantially more than half (it's somewhat surprising in hindsight that those 2 teams only played 3 finals against each other).
Russell retired before he had to face Kareem. (This would be like if Kareem retired before the Lakers beat Boston in terms of age)
Wilt beat Kareem to win the title in 1972
people forget that bird/magic was a proxy rivalry lol they didnt see each other that much. The sixers/celtics were much more of a rivalry during the 80s
143= I love you
Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell loved each other
Russell outscored Chamberlain maybe 3 or 4 times in that entire stretch of playoff games iirc
There was 10 teams back when they played.
There were like 12 teams when they played lol
Embiid\Jokic was supposed to be the next Wilt\Russell
Instead, Embiid ducks playing in Denver for 3 straight years and also ducks the finals. So, we'll probably get like 10 matchups in their primes i guess
“Ducks the finals” is certainly one way to put it
Ducks the finals so hard he doesn't even wanna risk it by playing in the conference finals.
I thought this narrative went away when he literally tore his meniscus trying to come back early after y’all clowned him in January
Oh yea some people on reddit influenced Embiid to play while injured lmao
Not Reddit specifically, but yeah I do think the narrative matters to embiid.
I think it mattered more that he wanted to keep up the pace of games played so he could make it to 65 and win MVP again.
FFS, read the next few words.
There were basically two teams in the league back then. The Celtics and whoever had Wilt. None of their records are as impressive when you look at it that way.
People falsely assume less teams somehow made life easier for a guy like Wilt. No, you were running up against dudes like Russell CONSTANTLY
Imagine all the talent in the NBA today had to be condensed down to 8 teams - if the worst player in the league was the 120th best player
No shit. There were like 8 teams and 82 games lol