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NBA Hall of Famer Bill Russell passed away peacefully today at age 88. During his remarkable career, Russell won 11 championships in 13 seasons with the Boston Celtics and was also a leader in civil rights, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, the nation’s highest civilian honor. BOB CRAVEN has the details.

THE original "#6", Bill Russell, has left the building to join the great pickup game in the sky, aged 88. 

Russell was a longtime resident here in the Seattle area and was one of the greatest of the greats in basketball anywhere. 

He anchored the incomparable Boston Celtic dynasty that won 11 NBA championships in 13 years — the last two as the first Black head coach in any major US sport — and he also marched for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr. 

He had been ill for a long time and was not well enough to present the NBA Finals MVP trophy named for him this past June as was originally planned.

A Hall of Famer, Russell was a five-time NBA MVP and 12-time All-Star, and in 1980 was voted by basketball writers as the greatest player in NBA history.  He won with defence and rebounding, leaving the scoring to others.

He was born in Louisiana and was a child when his family moved to Oakland, California, the San Francisco Bay Area. 

He was a star there in high school and then at the U. of San Francisco, where he and KC Jones led them to back-to-back NCAA titles in 1955 and 1956. 

Later in 1956, he led the US to the gold medal in basketball at the Olympic Games in Melbourne. 

Boston Celtics’ coach Red Auerbach worked a deal with the St. Louis Hawks and took Russell with the #2 pick in that year’s draft. 

Interestingly, he arrived in Boston to complaints that “he wasn’t good enough” and that “all he could do was block shots and rebound”. 

Auerbach’s reply to that kind of criticism was succinct:  “That’s enough”.

In that same draft, the Celtics picked his college teammate, KC Jones, and also picked up Tommy Heinsohn. 

Even though Russell arrived late to the Celtics due to his participation in the Olympics, the Celtics had the league’s best record that year and won the NBA title in a monumental double overtime seventh game against the St. Louis Hawks and Bob Pettit.

During his NBA career, Russell averaged more rebounds than points every season, and averaged 20 rebounds per game in 10 seasons, with a high of 51 in a game. 

Auerbach retired after the 1966 season and Russell became the player-coach, retiring himself after the Finals in 1969. 

The Celtics retired his #6 jersey in 1972. He earned spots on the NBA’s 25th, 35th, and 75th all-time teams, and in 1996 was named one of the NBA’s 50 greatest players. 

In 2009, the MVP trophy of the NBA Finals was named in his honour, even though Russell never won that trophy himself — it wasn’t awarded for the first time until 1969.

“This is one of my proudest moments in basketball, because I determined early in my career, the only important statistic in basketball is the final score,” Russell said after the NBA announced its Finals MVP Award would be named in his honour.

Russell is still the only player to win an NCAA championship, an Olympic gold medal, and an NBA title all in a year.

But it is a doubly sad day as we also lost Nichelle Nichols at age 89. 

As Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek series, she was one of the first Black actresses on TV in a major role, and she and Captain Kirk (William Shatner) performed the first interracial kiss seen on network TV.

Nichelle was a pioneer and a trail-blazing role model. May she Rest in Peace.