Malcolm Emmons- USA TODAY Sports
Top defensive accolades: One All-Defensive 1st Team selection, five times NBA rebounds leader
NBA rank: 2nd in total rebounds
Share of the vote: 100.0 percent of the maximum amount possible
11-time NBA champion and five-time NBA MVP Bill Russell was known for his rebounding, playmaking and, most of all, his defending. Even taking the era he played into account, we still came up with Russell as the best defender in NBA history, leading the way to a record amount of championships for the Boston Celtics.
We obviously don’t have any official data on Russell’s defensive numbers, nor were defensive accolades a thing until very late on in his career – even then, Russell has one 1st Team All-Defense on his resume, which came in 1968-69, the final year of his career when he was already 34 – so we mostly had to fall back on video evidence…
Celtics legend Sam Jones said Russell’s mere presence would have opponents settling up for midrange jumpers rather than attack him near the rim (via Sporting News):
“Everybody was just afraid of Russell, including the guys who were shooting from outside when they wanted to go in and take a layup,” Jones said. “They knew they were not gonna get a layup, so they would stop short and take a jump shot. He just intimidated people.”
Another Hall of Fame teammate of Russell’s, Bob Cousy, also compared the center to a man playing amongst boys in that era due to his intensity, speed and quickness. Considering Russell was reportedly 6-foot-10 with a 7-foot-4 wingspan and a freak athlete (Russell once told Kendrick Perkins on Twitter that he was an Olympic-level high jumper in his heyday), that might not be too far off from the truth. Russell also had a fantastic basketball IQ, as he was notorious for blocking shots and keeping the ball in bounds to maintain possession, among other things.
One RealGM poster went back through old newspaper articles to give a rough estimate of the type of block numbers Russell might have put up in his prime and came up with 8.1 blocks on a sample size of 135 games. Obviously, the actual number was almost certainly lower than that, as games in which Russell got a mundane number of blocks probably didn’t get mentioned in the post-game newspaper reports as often. Plus, his career spanned 963 regular-season games, so 135 games is a decent but not great sample size for Russell’s time in the NBA.
Even so, Russell was one of one when it came to defensive impact to winning, so he earns the top spot in our ranking of greatest defenders in NBA history.
