Watching The 2014 NBA Finals From Afar With Admiration

http://www.nba.com/2014/news/06/05/bill-russell-column-for-finals/index.html



Watching The Finals 2014 from afar with admiration
Bill Russell, for NBA.com
Posted Jun 5, 2014 2:02 PM


I'm an old guy that has this really bad, bad habit: I like to watch good teams play. And the Miami Heat and the San Antonio Spurs in this year's NBA Finals are not only two really good teams but two teams I particularly enjoy watch playing.

As a fan, I focus on the nuances of the game, the chess match that goes on between both teams. And this series will be no different. How will Miami try to exploit the Spurs? What will San Antonio do to offset the Heat? Last year, we saw the Spurs allow LeBron James to shoot from the outside while packing the paint, deterring him from driving. Will they try to do the same this year? The team that is most successful in exploiting the other team will win. Make the other team make adjustments and the team that has to make the most adjustments always falls behind.

There is a lot of talk about what is at stake in this upcoming NBA Finals. Miami is going for three consecutive NBA championships, trying to become only the fourth franchise in NBA history to achieve that milestone. The Spurs are going for their fifth title in 15 years. Both franchises are being celebrated for their consistency over the years and this Finals rematch is drawing great anticipation.

While these accomplishments are looked at as a collective body of work, when I played, there was always a singular championship focus because if you look ahead, it won't be long before you are eliminated.

It might seem strange but I did not know our Celtic teams won eight championships in a row until about 20 years ago when I read about it in a game program. Our focus was always on that particular season, always one year at a time. The year we played had nothing to do with the previous year or the next year. That's just the way it was.

Now, I don't know if Miami is thinking about winning three in a row. In the NBA Finals, there's pressure and you always see how players react to the pressure. For some guys, it makes them a step slower while for other guys, it makes them a step faster. I like to watch to see how teams react to the pressure because for the really great players, there isn't any pressure, you just go out and play.

While fans, media and even some former players like to compare great teams with other great teams from different eras, it's just not practical. The game today is a different game than when I played or even when George Mikan played. For example, you were not allowed to play zone defense and today, everyone plays a zone. On the Celtics, we had seven players who averaged double figures. Today's good teams have only three. In my 13 years, the Celtics never had a player who led the league in scoring. As a result, when someone retired, it allowed another player to step into that slot, which enabled for a high level of consistency.

It's a different game, which requires different skills. So, I could not legitimately compare these teams today with any of my teams nor can I compare myself to any of the players today. It's still called basketball but it's applied differently.

While the game today may be different, I still have great admiration for today's players, particularly those playing in this series. I would have liked to have played with the three guys in San Antonio -- Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili -- because they put the most pressure on the defense and if you could play at all, it would be easy and fun to play with them. The same thing is true of LeBron and Dwyane Wade. Both guys are really, really good. And when I say good, I'm not limiting it to only scoring. They also excel as defenders and passers. They both have different starting points, which makes it difficult to guard them. See, each player has a favorite spot where he starts, not where he finishes but where he starts. Both of these players have multiple places where they can start, which makes it very challenging defensively. A lot of people like to call them natural athletes, which I disagree. There's no such thing. I like to think that they simply know what they're doing, which makes them great.

I'm a big fan of Tim Duncan. He's playing at a high level at an age (38) where a lot of people are not playing. He has successfully been able to intelligently change his game to fit his body this year. But as far as I'm concerned, he's a center, not a forward. Most of his work is done in the post. I wouldn't list him as a forward or as a guard. I would list him as a great player. Period.

One of the attributes that makes Duncan great is his integrity. When he said after the Spurs eliminated the Oklahoma City Thunder that they were going to win this time against the Heat, he was saying what he believes. He wasn't sending a message to Miami or his teammates. You have to take in consideration, maybe he sees something that no one else has seen.

When I played, I never, ever tried to send a message. Before the playoffs, when a reporter asked if he thought we had a chance to win the championship, my reply was, 'We've done it before.'

In the playoffs and especially The Finals, one of the big advantages is to play the same team over and over with no other team in between. This way, you can make intelligent adjustments. Now, this is a second year in a row the Heat and Spurs will play each other and with the Celtics, we've had some experience playing the Los Angeles Lakers in back-to-back Finals on three separate occasions. The last time being in 1969 when we went to a seventh game against them in L.A. That season, we had finished fourth in the Eastern Conference, securing the last playoff spot. We get to the seventh game of The Finals and I said to the guys, 'The Lakers don't have a chance tonight.' And they looked at me like I had lost it.

One of the things we knew how to do was to play our opponents. We played the Lakers six games and by this time we knew what worked. We knew they were an excellent team but they were so slow a foot. In the half-court offense, they will beat you to death plus we were an undersized team. The reason we are going to beat them is because we are going to fast break them. And you always hear that you cannot fast break in The Finals because other teams won't let you.

Well, I learned from experience that the key to a fast break is defensive rebounding and outlet passing. I told my guys, 'I am the best to have ever done those things. So, I want both of our guards and our small forward to line up at each side of the court between the foul line and half court. So that when I rebound, I can quickly get the ball to the guy on the same side. So, that's what we did and we ended up scoring 59 points by half time.

Fast-break offense was not new to us. We were very versatile. We could play to our strengths against every team.

Intelligent adjustments. Ultimately, this NBA championship will come down to intelligent adjustments. Who will make the most of them and when? The beauty is that no one knows until it tips off Thursday night. While I'm not in the prediction business, it wouldn't surprise me if this series went the distance like last year.

One thing's for sure: I'll be watching. At my age, some bad habits are really hard to break.



bob



.

Thanks, Bob. And thanks, Bill.

Bill Russell - supremely intelligent. What a winner in every way.

Love to read writings credited to Russ. He seems to delight in viewing things from a different angle—or maybe it's just that he thinks from a different angle. Hard to believe he didn't know about the eight straight championships until roughly 20 years ago. (That would be about 28 years after the end of that string.) If he says so, I'm willing to believe it, but.....

I'm delighted that he spoke about versatility. For years, I've maintained that versatility was one of the factors (perhaps the preeminent one) that separated that team for any other (in its various iterations) of all time. They could play virtually every style and win handily.

I'm happy that he's enjoying these playoffs, and I hope he's doing extremely well in general.

Sam

I also like this passage:

"They (James and Wade) both have different starting points, which makes it difficult to guard them. See, each player has a favorite spot where he starts, not where he finishes but where he starts. Both of these players have multiple places where they can start, which makes it very challenging defensively"

Reminds me of that Red on Roundball segment on shotblocking where Russell demonstrates how an opponent"s shot is blocked before it is taken by denying him his favorite starting position and making him come into yours.

Do that and the shot block is a foregone conclusion.

Like you Sam I was surprised that Russell did not know his teams won eight straight titles. But I wasn't shocked. He had the be-here now grounded focus that is necessary to stay on top. He did not spent much time existing in the past or the future at least when it came to basketball.

Sloop,

When you get right down to it, has there ever been a player in pro basketball history who had had a more perfect attitude/temperament/cerebral approach to the game? The only one I know of who might come close was Cousy.

Sam

Both Russell and Cousy were before my time so my impressions of them come mostly from their words.  

In Cousy's "Last Loud Roar" he talks about intentionally risking turnovers--at appropriate times-- with  low percentage passes with the goal of rewarding players and thus supplying extra motivation for them to continue playing their roles.

Russell in "Second Wind" called Cousy the most intelligent person he ever played with who really knew how to keep the team cohesive.

One of my favorite passages from Russell's book was when he describes how he and KC Jones while still at USF decided that basketball boiled down to its essence was about how best to exploit the angles created by 10 rapidly moving objects in which the horizontal angles were far more important than the vertical.

As an example, Russ wrote about how KC was one of the few people who really appreciated a play where Russell chased down and blocked a breakaway layup.

KC immediately recognized that the beauty of the play was not the block but what led to it: Russell took a huge step toward the sideline before chasing the opponent down.  This  allowed Russ to intercept  the player at an angle so he could block the shot without fouling.

Pretty cool stuff.  As Russ said he and KC felt like rocket scientists in sneakers.

Sloop,

That "risking turnovers" passage (which I believe featured Tom Sanders as an example) is the number one reason why "The Last Loud Roar" is my all-time favorite basketball book. And why Bob Cousy is my all-time favorite basketball player. (Sam Jones is my all-time favorite basketball friend.)

You would have loved watching those teams. Part of what kept them so vibrant in my observation was that they had no single formula for success. In some games, they'd jump out to huge leads and coast to victory. In other games, they'd fall behind—sometimes well behind—and come back in the fourth quarter to vin.

They were famous for their devastating fast break, and it truly was wondrous to behold, more often than not involving a bare minimum of dribbling and sometimes none at all despite the fact that as many as three or four of them would handle the ball. But their halfcourt motion offense (especially after Sam joined the team, later buttressed by Havlicek's arrival) was a thing of beauty and incredibly effective. Whether they were running the scissors play (with Cousy throwing an entry pass to Russ and both Cousy and the shooting guard criss-crossing as they broke around Russ and toward the hoop) or the weave (the most aesthetically pleasing basketball I've ever witnessed, and extremely effective in breaking a guy loose) or the Philadelphia Play (the closest thing to isolation I ever saw them run) or another of Red's seven basic plays with scores of options, they very, very seldom executed poorly.

They were also masters of improvisation. Sam once returned from a game in Baltimore, which the Celtics had won via a second half rally after having trailed by a wide margin in the first half. Sam said that, at halftime, they sat around and bemoaned the fact that the Bullets seemed to be ready for every fast break move on the Celtics' part.

"So, in the second half, we played pitty pat ball," he said. We walked the ball up, threw more passes than usual, and it drove them crazy. They didn't know what to do. Because of the slow pace, we didn't come back as quickly as we're used to, but we knew there was enough time for us to come back all the way."

Sam also revealed that smothering the Bullets' offense in the second half was easy because the Celtics discovered that, when the Bullets figuratively called someone's number, they literally called the number of that person. "I can't believe they were so stupid," stated Sam.

As for defense of those teams, I was never aware of a specific system they used. It was, of course, all man-to-man—no zone crutch allowed in those days. They did switch a lot, but they used the switch not simply to adjust to a move by the offensive team but often to attack the offensive team by anticipating what a given opponent was about to do and switching in advance to screw him up and often force a turnover. The guards gambled on the perimeter and in the passing lanes (I believe Cousy would have easily led the league in steals if that stat had been kept) because the human fly swatter was lying in wait behind them.

One stat they would have dominated if it had been recorded was touchdown passes. Just as we see today, a frontcourt Celtic would usually inbound the ball after an enemy basket. He'd inbound, usually to Cousy (or later K.C. or Sam), who would sometimes dribble upcourt and sometimes just throw a baseball pass to another streaking Celtic (often, surprisingly, to less speedy players like Heinsohn, Nellie or—yes—Sanders who had started racing upcourt as soon as the other team had scored or Russell had blocked a shot to one of his own guys). What really made the play was that it looked like a regular trot down the floor was developing because the front court player inbounded the ball. If a guard had inbounded the ball, the other team would have been alerted to expect a floor-length pass.

There were many such nuances in their games, and it kept a really intense observer in a constant state of rapt attention so as not to miss anything.

You would have loved it!

Sam