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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 4237764, member: 289"] Basketball started as purely a team sport. Infact one of Naismith's early ideas was that the court would be divided into a grid with a player for each team in each square and whoever had the ball would have to pass or shoot it past the guy in his square. There could be no stars. Even after they abandoned the grid, coaches would have their team move in patterns like "the weave", which again repressed individual activity. But over time it was noticed that some players were better, or at least bigger than others and it behooved teams to get those guys the ball as much as possible. If your team had a star and the other didn't, you won. If both teams had stars, it would be a battle of the stars. The NBA when Wilt came along was governed by the star system. The Hawks had Bob Pettit. the Lakers had Elgin Baylor. The Royals had Oscar Robertson. Jerry West would soon join the Lakers to give them a 1-2 punch. Our Nats had Dolph Schayes. And the Warriors had Wilt, the greatest star of all. Those would have been the dominant teams, except that the Celtics were re-inventing the game. Their star, Bill Russell was not a great scorer. Instead he was a great defensive player. So Red Auerbach built his team around defense and took advantage of the fact that basketball is the game where offense can be generated by defense more than any other. he wanted his team to get the ball and run, hitting the open man. Instead of having one star score 30+ points a game in a half-court set, he had his Celtics hit the open man and beat the other team down court. Everybody score 15-20 points a game and the Celtics outscored everybody, averaging 120+ points per game while playing the best defense in the league. it was a combination even the greatest star player couldn't overcome and the Celtics won 11 titles in 13 years. Bill was surrounded by some great players: Tom Heinsohn, Bob Cousey, Bill Sharman, Frank Ramsey, John Havlicek, KC and Same Jones, etc. But Wilt played with some great players, too: Paul Arizin, Tom Gola, Guy Rodgers, Al Attles, Tom Meschery, Willie Naulls, Nate Thurmond, Hal Greer, Larry Costello, Luke Jackson, Chet Walker, Billy Cunningham, Wali Jones and then, in LA, Baylor and West, Gail Goodrich and Happy Hairston. Wilt realized midway through his career that trying to personally outscore the Celtics wasn't working and he would have to adopt elements of their style of play and use the talents of his teammates more to be successful. In the 1965-66 season they beat out the Celtics for the Eastern title but lost in the playoffs. In 1966-67 they blew past the Celtics with the best record in NBA history to that point, 68-13, beat them in five games in the playoffs and then beat Rick Barry's Warriors, (Rick was the new scoring champ) for the title. They again won the east the next year but were upset by the Celtics in the playoffs. Wilt then moved on to LA where they tried to win with the triumvirate of Wilt, Elgin and Jerry but failed. Russell and then Baylor retired and Wilt and Jerry, playing very much as the Celtics had, set a new record for wins in 1971-72 with 69-13, including a professional sports record of 33 wins in a row and won another title. They were back in the finals the next year but were upset by the Knicks and Wilt retired. Had he kept on setting scoring records, Wilt's career numbers would never have been topped. But by changing the way he and his teams played to a more successful system he won two championships with team that had the best regular season record in league history until the Bulls finally topped them a generation later. [/QUOTE]

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