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USA Today Sports Media Group
USA Today Sports Media Group
Sport
Justin Quinn

Boston Celtics place 17 alumni on the ‘Bill Russell Scale’

The greatest winner of all time, Boston Celtics Hall of Fame big man Bill Russell, had such a profound impact on the sport of basketball that Yahoo Sports’ Ben Rohrbach named a metric designed specifically to measure Russell’s sort of greatness.

Updating it for the second straight year since its creation in 2021, Rohrbach recently released the 2022 version of what he has dubbed the predictably-titled “Bill Russell Scale” to help us take stock of how greats across eras are currently stacking up against one another. “Russell’s accomplishments also do not fit neatly into a statistical box,” writes Rohrbach. “He was not an all-time great scorer, and PER fails to properly capture the impact he clearly had.”

“This is why setting him as the gold standard makes so much sense,” adds the Yahoo analyst — and with that, let’s see where Celtics alumni stack up in 2022.

No. 70 - Chauncey Billups

(AP Photo/Scott Audette)

No. 68 - Bob McAdoo

(No. 11) Dick Raphael/NBAE via Getty Images

No. 66 - Dave Cowens

Manny Rubio-USA TODAY Sports

No. 65 - Kevin McHale

USA TODAY Sports

No. 62 - Bill Sharman

(AP Photo)

No. 55 - Ray Allen

(Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

No. 48 - Sam Jones

Darryl Norenberg-USA TODAY Sports Network

No. 46 - Robert Parish

(AP Photo/Jon Chase)

No. 44 - Dominique Wilkins

JOHN MOTTERN/AFP via Getty Images

No. 43 - Paul Pierce

AP Photo/Elise Amendola

No. 42 - Gary Payton, Sr.

(AP Photo/Gregory Smith)

No. 24 - Bob Cousy

Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images

No. 20 - Kevin Garnett

(AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

No. 17 - John Havlicek

Malcolm Emmons-USA TODAY Sports

No. 9 - Larry Bird

Dick Raphael-USA TODAY Sports

No. 8 - Shaquille O'Neal

Mark L. Baer-USA TODAY Sports

No. 1 - Bill Russell

AP Photo/Harold Filan

Listen to the “Celtics Lab” podcast on:

Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3zBKQY6

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3GfUPFi

YouTube: https://bit.ly/3F9DvjQ

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