The Road to Number 5 (Part 1)

It was turning into one of the rites of spring: flowers bloom, birds sing, and the Boston Celtics win a championship. By spring of 1962, the Boston Celtics had won three NBA titles in a row and four out of five. One more title would put them in the company of the New York Yankees and Montreal Canadiens, five-time champions considered dynasties in their respective sports.

In many ways, 1961-62 was the season the NBA came of age. College basketball was no longer more popular than the professional brand. The league had a loyal fan base, a national television contract, a new team, the Chicago Packers, legitimate superstars in Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and Bob Cousy, and upcoming stars in Elgin Baylor, Jerry West and Oscar Robertson. On top of that, the game was becoming more fluid and exciting, as the fast break and the jump shot increased scoring and decreased slugging.

It was the season of the scorer. Every team in the league averaged at least 110 points. Wilt Chamberlain averaged 50.4 points per game and performed the incredible feat of scoring 100 points in a single contest. L.A. teammates Jerry West and Elgin Baylor averaged a combined 70 points per game. Oscar Robertson for the season averaged a triple double of 30.8 points, 12.5 rebounds and 11.4 assists.

Maybe it was all the above-ground nuclear testing in the USA and USSR, because even Bill Russell's scoring average went up. Joking aside, it was a conscious effort on Bill's part. With Bill Sharman retired, and with Satch Sanders and K.C. Jones getting so many minutes, Bill felt the need to score more. Part of that had to do with Wilt: Bill learned that there were certain nights when he could contain Wilt and actually outscore him.

The situation appealed to Bill's sense of humor and gamesmanship: the great defender out psyching his opponent by outscoring him. Bill could do it because he was thoroughly misunderstood and egregiously underrated as an offensive weapon. Simply put, when you're 6' 10" tall, and you can out-think, outrun, outjump and out-quick everyone else on the floor, you don't need a jump shot.

Bill liked to choose his spots, scoring in bunches. He played the game within the game within the game. At the University of San Francisco, he and K.C. Jones found they could intimidate, even terrify opposing teams with a blitzkrieg offense triggered by extreme defensive pressure. They brought this defense-creates-offense style of play to the Celtics where it meshed perfectly.

Hal DeJulio, the USF scout who watched Bill's last high school game, noted with interest how Bill scored all his points at the end of the half and at the end of the game. It was a pattern he continued to follow throughout his career: call it opportunistic offense.

Most of the time, Bill geared his offensive game not toward scoring, but toward helping his teammates get points. If he didn't need to score, he didn't bother. That's how he became the most prolific passer on the Celtics after Bob Cousy. However, at critical junctures when the team needed it, Bill would take over the offense and be unstoppable. Game 7 of the 1962 NBA Finals was an excellent example.

To get to the NBA Finals, Bill Russell and the Bostob Celtics needed to overcome Wilt Chamberlain and the Philadelphia Warriors in the Eastern Conference Finals. It was an epic battle that wasn't decided until the final second of the seventh game.

Bill was already exhausted heading into the playoffs. His so-called backup, Gene Conley, had been lost to expansion in the offseason. Conley wasn't really a backup, but he did fill an important role in the way Bill dealt with Wilt. Bill didn't leave the game when Conley came in, but having Conley on the floor to cover Wilt, freed Bill to deal with the other four Warriors. Conley usually gave six to eight minutes of tough defense, beating Wilt to spots, blocking him out, hanging on him, and generally pounding him. Conley was a dangerous man on the floor, dangerous to teammates and opponents alike, still he gave Bill occasional breathers and saved wear and tear over the long season.

After Bill, the next tallest regulars on the Celtics were Satch Sanders, 6' 8", Tom Heinsohn, 6' 7", and Jim Loscutoff, 6' 6". There were also bench players Gene Guarilia, 6' 6", and Carl Braun, 6' 5". With Conley gone and no one on the team to play center, Bill carried a heavy load of minutes and responsibility all season long. He was already exhausted from the regular season, yet in the playoffs, in two hard-fought, seven-game series, he would push himself to play almost every minute (674 out of 677).


The Celtics finished the regular season with a league-record 60 wins and 20 losses. Of their playoff opponents, the Warriors went 49-31, and, the Lakers were 54-26. Although the Celtics had a first-round rest, the Warriors rolled over the Syracuse Nats and came to Boston confident and charged up.

Philadelphia was a different team under new coach Frank McGuire. Paul Arizin, Guy Rodgers, Tom Meschery and Tom Gola, the starters alongside Wilt, had become a bigger part of the offense this year - despite Wilt's amazing average and 100-point outburst - mainly because McGuire had convinced Wilt to pass the ball. Things didn't come together until the second half of the season: then, gradually they clicked and, by the time they reached the playoffs, McGuire had coached Wilt and the Warriors into a team-oriented, offensive juggernaut.

Bill Russell knew the importance of coaching: it was one of his advantages over other centers. Now, Wilt was backed by a smart coach and, to put it mildly, Bill was scared. Before the series, talking to a reporter, Bill said, "I've been telling you for three years, this man is a terrible man to be in there with when he's at his best." As the series wore on, Bill found it difficult to eat or sleep, and even had difficulty breathing. The confrontation with Wilt, who was clearly "at his best" in the 1962 Eastern Conference Finals, while the whole world was watching, with the championship on the line, took a terrible physical and psychological toll on Bill.

It was a back and forth series, Game 1 in Boston, Game 2 in Philadelphia, and so on, and so forth, each team winning at home to produce a sensational, winner-take-all Game 7, featuring a battle of true titans in a bare-handed showdown like nothing else in sports.

In the Western Conference, the Lakers easily erased the competition and waited to meet the winner of the east. Jerry West took the opportunity to fly to Boston ahead of the team and buy a ticket to the old Garden, rubbing elbows anonymously with the Boston fans. Studying both teams closely, West noted with dismay that Boston's defense always seemed to have answers for Philadelphis's offense, but the Warriors had no way of countering the Celtics defense.

West considered that apocalyptic Game 7 to be the greatest exhibition of basketball he had ever seen. Every sportswriter agreed it was one of the most exciting games of all time.

The Celtics, eleven point favorites, roared out to an early lead. The Warriors confidently surged back, with Wilt's passing making sure his teammates got involved, and sprinted ahead. It went back and forth like that, lead change after lead change, until midway through the fourth quarter, when Sam Jones and sixth man Frank Ramsey, shaking off painful injuries in both legs, got hot and shot the Celtics to a ten-point lead.

Up to that point, Bill Russell had somehow held Wilt Chamberlain to fifteen points, thirty-five below his season average. But Wilt was not ready yet to go gentle into that good night. With a minute left, with the Celtics ahead 105-102, Wilt got called for goaltending, that was probably not, and Wilt went on a tear, scoring five unanswered points and tying the game with sixteen seconds left. Three of those points came on foul shots. Wilt, a notoriously bad free throw shooter, made them when it counted, perhaps because he followed Frank McGuire's coaching and shot underhanded that season.

With the game tied and the Garden crowd holding its collective breath, K.C. Jones took the ball upcourt with Sam Jones on the wing. In Game 5 of this series, on April Fool's Day, Sam and Wilt got into a ridiculous altercation, with Wilt shoving Sam off the parquet and Sam brandishing a photographer's stool, like a lion tamer, to protect himself.

At the end of Game 7, with the seconds ticking away, Sam settled in, fifteen feet from the basket, behind a Bill Russell screen. K.C. leaped into the air for a jump shot, changed his mind, turned his head and twisted in the air, tossing the ball to Sam. Red and the Celtics bench were on their feet, pointing at the basket, shouting "Go! Go!!" Sam Jones leaped and let fly a high, arching shot, wriggled his shoulders for good luck, and watched the ball split the strings for a two-point lead with three seconds left.

McGuire signalled for timeout as the ball went through the net. The fans rushed the court. The players looked at the clock: there was one second remaining.

McGuire called a play for Wilt, then realized there was one second on the clock and went bezerk. He argued vociferously, but unsuccessfully; there was simply nothing Frank McGuire could say or do to convince referee Mendy Rudolph to put the two seconds back. The public address announcer spoke, deus ex machina: "There is one second of play remaining."

Philadelphia inbounded the ball toward Wilt. Bill Russell deflected it to Sam Jones and the buzzer sounded. The Celtics met Wilt Chamberlain at his best and, thanks to magnificent defensive play by Bill Russell, they prevailed.

Many years later, Red Auerbach admitted rather cagily that the clock was indeed operated by a Celtics employee and did occasionally have mechanical malfunctions that caused it to jump ahead by two seconds at the end of certain games. Whatever the ethics of the malfunction, the Boston Celtics moved on to face the Los Angeles Lakers for the first time ever in the NBA Finals.