Bill Russell, Who Led Celtics to 11 NBA Titles, Dies at 88

Bill Russell, Who Led Celtics to 11 NBA Titles, Dies at 88

Boston Celtics center Bill Russell has died at 88. His family announced his death on Sunday.

He led the Celtics to 11 NBA Championships — two of them as head coach.

He won back-to-back NCAA basketball championships.

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He won an Olympic gold medal.

As a player, he was the most accomplished athlete in any professional team sport.

He was the first Black coach of a professional team sport, and, accordingly, the first to coach a championship.

The New York Times recounted, “When Russell was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1975, Red Auerbach, who orchestrated his arrival as a Celtic and coached him on nine championship teams, called him ‘the single most devastating force in the history of the game.’”

In 1980, he was voted the greatest player in NBA history.

“Bill Russell was the greatest champion in all of team sports,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement on Sunday. 

“The most important measure of how good a game I’d played,” he once said, “was how much better I’d made my teammates play.” 

Former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, who faced Russell with the Knicks in the 1960s, viewed him as “the smartest player ever to play the game and the epitome of a team leader.”

“At his core, Russell knew that he was different from other players — that he was an innovator and that his very identity depended on dominating the game,” Bradley wrote in reviewing Russell’s remembrances of Auerbach in “Red and Me: My Coach, My Lifelong Friend” (2009) for The New York Times.

He was also a civil rights leader and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

The NAACP tweeted Sunday, "Many will acknowledge your amazing accomplishments on the basketball court. But we will celebrate your fight on behalf of our community for civil rights and a brighter future. Thank you, #BillRussell. Thank you for defending us. Thank you for fighting for us."

“Bill stood for something much bigger than sports: the values of equality, respect and inclusion that he stamped into the DNA of our league,” Silver said. “Through the taunts, threats and unthinkable adversity, Bill rose above it all and remained true to his belief that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity.”