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dabask11
Star Player
Joined: 27 Dec 2012
Posts: 1901
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 Posted: Sun Jul 31, 2022 8:27 pm Post subject: |
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| CervantesRises wrote: | | Basketball Fan wrote: | Why is this on the Lakers Lounge? I mean RIP but that's the first thing I noticed.
I just watched the 30 for 30 on the Lakers/Celtics trilogy if you haven't seen it I highly recommend. |
Because it's appropriate to show respect to fellow champions who also happen to be global icons even if they played for our rival.
The Celtics mourned Kobe and the Lakers will mourn Bill...and on LG, the Lounge is the most appropriate place to do so for greatness. |
Not only that but you can’t talk about the Lakers without mentioning their battles against the Celtics, in which Russell played a huge role.
Bill Russell is as close as you can get to being part of Laker lore without donning the jersey.
RIP to an absolute legend. |
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waterman40
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Joined: 17 Jun 2003
Posts: 5996
Location: Central Coast
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| Posted: Sun Jul 31, 2022 9:57 pm Post subject: |
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RIP
Most of the Celtics I couldn't give a rip about, but he is one that due our respect.
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TooMuchMajicBuss
Franchise Player
Joined: 17 Sep 2008
Posts: 20605
Location: In a white room, with black curtains near the station
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| Posted: Sun Jul 31, 2022 11:17 pm Post subject: |
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He was a big part of the Celtics winning so many consecutive championships in the '60's, many at the Lakers' expense. A great nemesis, but also a warrior and a great champion. He built the wall that the Lakers spent the next half century climbing just to match the C's tally of titles won.
So yeah he's definitely part of Lakers lore.
RIP to a great player. |
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focus
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Joined: 23 May 2012
Posts: 2293
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ElginBaylor
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Joined: 05 Nov 2005
Posts: 10589
Location: Hoosier Nation
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| Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 6:09 am Post subject: |
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Definitely a legend who deserves the utmost respect despite him playing for the most evil team in sports history.
But you know what this means...Celtics will probably win it all this year.
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danzag
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Joined: 28 Apr 2013
Posts: 20874
Location: Brazil
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| Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 6:50 am Post subject: |
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RIP. Great player and even greater human being.
Loved seeing his relationship with Kobe. Now they're back together.
One of the few respectable Celtics  |
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Black20Ice
Star Player
Joined: 24 Jun 2005
Posts: 1685
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| Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 8:54 am Post subject: |
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| Like Jackie Robinson with MLB, Russell's #6 should be retired around the league for all he stood for on and off the court.🍀 |
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activeverb
Retired Number
Joined: 17 Jun 2006
Posts: 34299
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| Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 10:36 am Post subject: |
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| Basketball Fan wrote: | Why is this on the Lakers Lounge? I mean RIP but that's the first thing I noticed.
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The same reason that trade rumors are talked about in the Lakers Lounge rather than in the Trade and Free Agency Discussion forum: If you post something in any place other than the Lakers Lounge, no one notices. My guess is the moderators let this one slide because of the Celtics/Lakers connection, or just out of respect for Bill. |
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CabinCreek44
Star Player
Joined: 16 Apr 2001
Posts: 3845
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| Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 12:41 pm Post subject: |
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| Black20Ice wrote: | | Like Jackie Robinson with MLB, Russell's #6 should be retired around the league for all he stood for on and off the court.🍀 |
This. Couldn’t agree more. A man with real integrity.
As for hoops, 11 titles in 13 years. That will never happen again.
It’s embarrassing, all the talk down thru the years, “this guy is the GOAT, that guy is the GOAT.” The GOAT just passed. It sucks that Baylor and West had to go thru all that agony at the hands of the Celts, but they had Russell and he piled up playoff wins on Wilt too.
RIP, William Felton Russell. |
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Superlaker66
Starting Rotation
Joined: 01 Nov 2010
Posts: 207
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| Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 12:44 pm Post subject: |
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| Absolute legend! RIP Bill Russell. |
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jonnybravo
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JUST-MING
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Joined: 23 Jun 2005
Posts: 41325
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| Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 6:35 pm Post subject: |
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| David Friedman wrote: |
Remembering Bill Russell, The Greatest Champion in North American Team Sports History
Bill Russell, who led the Boston Celtics to an unprecedented and unsurpassed 11 NBA titles in his 13 season career, passed away yesterday at the age of 88. He led a remarkable life filled not only with accomplishments on the basketball court but also imbued with intelligence, courage, dignity, and tenacity away from the basketball court.
Russell led McClymonds High School to two California state basketball titles. During an era when the sport of basketball was only beginning to integrate, he was not heavily recruited, but he accepted a scholarship to the University of San Francisco and promptly led the Dons to a 55 game winning streak plus two NCAA championships. Russell is one of a select group of Division I players who have career averages of at least 20 ppg and at least 20 rpg. Although shotblocking statistics were not kept during that era, Russell was such a dominant defensive player that he would tell his teammate K.C. Jones to run to a particular spot where Russell would direct a blocked shot to start the fastbreak! Russell led the United States basketball team to a gold medal in the 1956 Olympic Games at Melbourne, Australia before returning to the United States and leading the Boston Celtics to the 1957 NBA championship as a rookie.
The Celtics lost to the St. Louis Hawks in the 1958 NBA Finals--Russell was hobbled by an injured ankle during that series--and then won an NBA record eight straight championships from 1959-66. Wilt Chamberlain's Philadelphia 76ers ended that streak in 1967. Chamberlain and Russell had perhaps the greatest rivalry not only in NBA history but in sports history. Chamberlain was the most dominant individual player, setting scoring and rebounding records that will likely never be broken, including most points in a season (4029), most points in a game (100), most career rebounds (23,924), most rebounds in a season (2149), and most rebounds in a game (55). Chamberlain was the first player to score more than 30,000 career regular season points, the only center to lead the NBA in assists, and the only player who has ranked first in scoring, rebounding, and assists at least once each for an entire season. Russell was not dominant in any statistical category other than rebounding (where he only trails Chamberlain in the record books), but Russell's teams won 11 titles while Chamberlain's teams won two titles.
Could Chamberlain have won more championships with better supporting casts? Would Russell have won fewer championships if he had played with Chamberlain's supporting casts? We will never know the answers to such hypothetical questions, but we know that Chamberlain was the most dominant offensive player ever while Russell was the most dominant defensive player ever.
During that era, the players voted for the regular season MVP award while media members voted for the All-NBA Teams. Russell won five MVP awards (1958, 1961-63, 1965) but received just three All-NBA First Team selections (1959, 1963, 1965), while Chamberlain won four MVP awards (1960, 1966-68) while receiving seven All-NBA First Team selections (1960-62, 1964, 1966-68). For some reason, the players ranked Russell higher, while the media members preferred Chamberlain.
The Celtics bounced back to win the 1968 title. In 1969, the aging Celtics finished fourth in the seven team Eastern Division in 1969, but they nevertheless reached the NBA Finals, where they faced a powerful L.A. Lakers squad featuring Chamberlain, Jerry West, and Elgin Baylor. My favorite Bill Russell story is about his last game: game seven of the 1969 NBA Finals. His Celtics faced the Lakers in Los Angeles. The Lakers published an elaborate description of how they would celebrate after winning the title, down to the details about which players would be interviewed after the game and about how 20,000 balloons would be released from the rafters while a band played "Happy Days Are Here Again." Russell saw those plans, and told his team simply that there were many things that could happen that day but one thing that could not happen was L.A. winning, so he looked forward to watching those balloons being taken down one by one. The Celtics won, 108-106, and Russell rode off into the sunset with 11 championship rings for 10 fingers.
The NBA Finals MVP award was first given out in 1969--West became the first and only player from the losing team to receive the honor--but in 2009 the NBA named the NBA Finals MVP award after Russell. Russell likely would have won more Finals MVPs than anyone else had the award existed throughout his career. Russell transformed a high scoring Boston team that could not win the big one into the greatest dynasty in North American sports history.
The way that championship ring counting is currently discussed is odd, because media members pretend that Michael Jordan--who won six NBA titles as a player--holds a record that was chased by Kobe Bryant (who finished with five NBA titles), LeBron James (four titles) and others. These media members ignore the six NBA titles won by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and they neglect to mention that Bill Russell won as many championships as Jordan and Bryant combined! The players closest to Russell on that list are former teammates, such as Sam Jones (10), K.C. Jones (eight), Tommy Heinsohn (eight), Satch Sanders (eight) and John Havlicek (eight, including two after Russell retired).
Russell served as player-coach during his final three seasons, winning back to back titles. He was the first Black coach in any of the four major American pro sports leagues. He had less successful stints coaching in Seattle and briefly in Sacramento. Russell joined John Wooden, Bill Sharman, Lenny Wilkens, and his teammate Tommy Heinsohn as the only people inducted in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a player and as a coach.
A lot has been said about the relative athletic ability of NBA players in the 1950s and 1960s, much of it ignorant babbling by people who do not have the faintest idea of what it means to be a great athlete or a great basketball player. Russell represented USF in track and field events, and in 1956 he was ranked as the seventh best high jumper in the world. Russell ran the 440 in 49.6 seconds. Remember, Russell posted those numbers as a 6-9 athlete whose primary sport was basketball, not track and field; someone who had world class jumping ability and speed under those conditions in the 1950s would surely have also been an elite athlete in the modern era with today's superior training conditions. If there is a plumber then or now who could keep up with Russell, I'd pay to see him.
Inevitably, Russell will be most remembered for his considerable on court accomplishments, but his life away from basketball should not be forgotten. Russell was a champion for social justice when that was not just a slogan but it meant actually taking a stand, taking risks, and possibly even putting your life in danger. Russell was front and center in Washington, D.C. in 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Russell marched in Mississippi after civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated. Russell refused to play in games when he and other Black players were not provided accommodations equal to the accommodations provided to White players. Russell's house was vandalized by racists who defecated on his bed and smashed his trophies. He was not a man who spoke platitudes while safely ensconced far away from the battles; Russell was on the front lines in the fight for racial equality. Russell was one of the leaders of the 1967 Muhammad Ali Summit in Cleveland, along with Jim Brown, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor). Russell received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
My basketball hero is Julius Erving, and I know that Bill Russell is Erving's basketball hero. Both of them felt unfulfilled about the time that they spent as TV basketball commentators because they understood that the deeper meaning of the sport cannot be conveyed in brief soundbites sandwiched between commercials. As Erving put it in his autobiography, "It is remarkable to me how we can fill hours, days even, of television talking about basketball, and yet I always feel that we are failing to communicate the truth of the game. Even here, in this book, I worry that I am not up to the task of explaining the essence of basketball as it is played at the highest levels. I feel that it is like trying to explain music through words or to describe a painting through text. You can give a feeling of the work, or compare it to something else, but you can't re-create the actual feeling of being on the court, or making that move, imposing your will, of the precise moment that you realize you can reach the front of the rim." I suspect that Russell agreed with those sentiments, and I always enjoyed listening to Russell's insights about basketball.
I never interviewed Russell, but I met him at an NBA Cares event. I shook his hand, and told him how much I respect what he accomplished. I hope that I made clear and that he understood I was not talking only about basketball.
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ContagiousInspiration
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Joined: 07 May 2014
Posts: 11844
Location: Boulder ;)
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| Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2022 8:00 am Post subject: |
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Thank you for sharing this. I can remember Wooden talking about the racism Lew/Kareem faced during his college career in sports.. so nice to read him talk about angry black man syndrome and how neither or them succumbed to any of that
and this last part.. really touching to see they remained in touch with each other all these years and.. Kareem is still "Kid" to him..  sry.. im a softie lol |
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Eindhoven
Star Player
Joined: 14 Jul 2015
Posts: 1856
Location: Zürich
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| Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2022 10:59 am Post subject: |
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A giant, a monster, a legend, as a player and as a man.
As GT/Pete said in the LFR podcast, it's amazing how little the green fanbase celebrate him.
Go on in peace, Bill!
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