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.
No. 70 – Chauncey Billups
(AP Photo/Scott Audette)
No. 68 – Bob McAdoo
(No. 11) Dick Raphael/NBAE via Getty Images
No. 66 – Dave Cowens
Manny Rubio-USA TODAY Sports
No. 65 – Kevin McHale
USA TODAY Sports
No. 62 – Bill Sharman
(AP Photo)
No. 55 – Ray Allen
(Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)
No. 48 – Sam Jones
Darryl Norenberg-USA TODAY Sports Network
No. 46 – Robert Parish
(AP Photo/Jon Chase)
No. 44 – Dominique Wilkins
JOHN MOTTERN/AFP via Getty Images
No. 43 – Paul Pierce
AP Photo/Elise Amendola
No. 42 – Gary Payton, Sr.
(AP Photo/Gregory Smith)
No. 24 – Bob Cousy
Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images
No. 20 – Kevin Garnett
(AP Photo/Elise Amendola)
No. 17 – John Havlicek
Malcolm Emmons-USA TODAY Sports
No. 9 – Larry Bird
Dick Raphael-USA TODAY Sports
No. 8 – Shaquille O’Neal
Mark L. Baer-USA TODAY Sports
No. 1 – Bill Russell
AP Photo/Harold Filan
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Story originally appeared on Celtics Wire
