Originally basketball was a purely team sport, with the players doing maneuvers like "the weave" to to try to get to the basket, (Naismith's first concept had the players on a grid and they were not allowed out of their 'box': the had to pass it from one box to another until the ball got close enough to the basket for someone to shoot, (this could accommodate an entire gym class in one game).
Then, as the game loosened up and the natural talent of the players came out. It became obvious that some players were a good deal better than others and they became 'stars'. The idea was to get a star player and if the other team didn't have one, you would win. If they did, it would be your star trying to out-score their star. The Celtic Era, without the Celtics would have been the height of that with Chamberlain, Robertson, Baylor and West, Pettit or later Barry dominating.
But the Celtics used Russell to change the game. His great talents were defense and rebounding. So the Celtics built their team around defense and then used their defense to ignite the offense on the fast break. They didn't care who scored- just hit the open man. Everybody scored 15-20 points per game. They scored more than anybody else and played the best defense in the league and basically just ran all those teams who were trying to get the ball to their star in the half court game right off the court.
Check out the team stats- and the winning percentage- on Basketball Reference.com:
http://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_1957.html
Keep clicking on "next season" to go through Russell's career, which ended in 1969. He was only with the Celtics for the second half of the 1956-57 season as he was helping our Olympic team bring home the Gold in the Melbourne Olympics, which was played in November as that's summertime in the southern hemisphere.
Bill's teams won the California state high school championship in his junior and senior years. Freshmen were not eligible in college. In his sophomore year, San Francisco went 14-7. His junior and senior years they went 57-1 and won two national championships. Then he got the gold medal in Melbourne and joined the Celtics, who had never won anything and they won 11 NBA titles in 13 years. They didn't win in 1958 because Russell had injured his ankle and they were beaten by the 1967 Philadelphia 76ers, one of the greatest teams of all time, (they went 79-16, including the playoffs). They were supposed to displace the Celtics but Boston won the next two titles, the last over a Lakers team that had Chamberlain, Baylor and West, the ultimate attempt to overwhelm the Celtics with star players, which failed. The year after he retired, the Celtics went 34-48 without Russell, whose teams had won the ultimate championship they could have won 18 times in 21 seasons, (counting the Olympics as a 'season').
Bill Russell was the greatest winner in the history of teams sports and his teams won because of him.
(And I wasn't a Celtics fan,e either. I rooted for Wilt and the Sixers.)
