Bill Russell won titles in his first and final seasons. Chamberlain led the league in both scoring and rebounding as a rookie and still was the NBA’s best board man entering retirement. Both made the All-Star team every year but one — Russell because his Olympic team commitment cost him the start of his rookie year and Chamberlain because a ruptured right patellar tendon cost him all but 12 games in 1969-70. Cutting their careers down to a specific prime almost seems disrespectful.
For his 14-year career, Chamberlain averaged 30.1 points (54.0 FG%, 51.1 FT%), 22.9 rebounds and 4.4 assists in 45.8 minutes per game. During that span, he led the league in scoring seven times (while leading the league in field-goal percentage nine times) and rebounding 11 times. His single-season highs were 50.4 points, 27.2 rebounds and 8.6 assists. (And, wildly, 48.5 minutes per game.) Chamberlain is, quite simply, the most dominant player statistically the game has ever seen.
Meanwhile, Russell averaged 15.1 points (44.0 FG%, 56.1 FT%), 22.5 rebounds and 4.3 assists in 42.3 minutes per game over his 13-year career. Stats don’t do him justice, especially since the league did not track blocks for the greatest defender in NBA history. Russell never averaged more than 18.2 points per game.
To give you an idea of Russell’s impact beyond statistics: Outside of his rookie season, when he received the seventh-most Most Valuable Player votes, he finished lower than fourth in MVP voting just once, in his second-to-last season, when as a player-coach he led the Celtics to the title. He won five MVPs, finishing second, third and fourth in the voting twice apiece. (In his 14 seasons, Chamberlain won four MVPs and finished outside the top four in the voting on five occasions.)
But we’re talking about stats here, and while we could argue whether Russell might have compiled greater individual numbers had he not played with a host of Hall of Famers, Chamberlain played with a cast of all-time greats, too. And any discussion always leads us to the same conclusion: The stats favor Chamberlain.
It depends on what you want out of Wilt if you are trying to determine his peak. From a statistical standpoint, he led the league in scoring and rebounding with 50.4 points and 25.7 boards while averaging 48.5 minutes over the course of a full 80-game season in 1961-62. That is the season he scored 100 points in a single game.
Still, both Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson, who averaged his triple-double that season, lost the MVP race to Russell by a wide margin, back when the players used to vote. That speaks to both the ludicrousness of the statistics at the time and the general opinion of Wilt, who attempted almost 30 percent of his team’s field-goal attempts that season (to Russell’s 6.3 percent) and was traded two years later.
It wasn’t until 1966-67 that Chamberlain dialed back his ball dominance for the betterment of the team. Sharing the wealth with three future Hall of Fame teammates, a 30-year-old Wilt averaged 7.8 assists to go with his 24.1 points (on career-high 68.3 percent shooting) and 24.2 rebounds per game. He was in the midst of a run on three straight MVPs, earning better than 75 percent of the vote.
Chamberlain led the Philadelphia 76ers to a league-best 68 wins that season, beating Russell’s Celtics in a five-game East finals set en route to his first title. In those playoffs, Chamberlain averaged a 22-29-9 on 57.9 percent shooting.
Of course, Russell already had nine rings by then. It’s hard to peg which of the four seasons in which Russell won regular-season MVP and a title was his best, but that ’62 season will do just fine. Again, the fact that he decisively won MVP in a season when Chamberlain and Robertson were at their statistical peaks says an awful lot.
The 1961-62 Celtics won 60 games in the regular season before taking a seven-game series against Chamberlain’s Warriors and a Los Angeles Lakers team stacked with Elgin Baylor and Jerry West at the top. Russell posted 30 points and an NBA-record 44 rebounds in Game 7 against the Lakers to win his fourth of eight straight titles.
Russell posted a career-high 18.9 points (on 45.7 percent shooting) at age 27 during that regular season, with 23.6 rebounds and 4.5 assists per game. As usual, he raised his game in the playoffs, averaging a 22-26-5 on 46/73 shooting splits. Really, though, you could pick any of Russell’s eight straight championship seasons as his peak, because he was so remarkably consistent — and consistently driven.
That’s the thing. When Chamberlain finally bought in to winning a ring, he submitted one of the great seasons in NBA history from the standpoint of individual statistics, team success and wall-to-wall domination. We can also debate whether that was because Russell struggled in his first year as player-coach or because his Celtics teammates had retired or faded by then, but I’m giving Wilt the slightest of edges when it comes to his absolute apex. It makes you wish he bought in all the time.
Advantage: Chamberlain