In an era when the N.B.A. was much less marketable, and therefore much less forcibly narrativized, than it is today, Russell nonetheless crafted a persona that lasted him a lifetime. Part of it was the intelligence and rectitude of his playing style. Over six-nine with long limbs and air-cutting speed, he offered his physical and mental gifts at the altar of defense. (He wasn’t known as a shooter, but he could’ve scored a lot if he’d made it a goal. One short video shows him on a fast break, zooming up-court, taking a few long steps that teleport him from half-court to the rim with an easy force that prefigures Giannis Antetokounmpo.) Game footage of Russell is rare, but what we do have reveals a greyhound’s grace and a brain like sonar, locating defenders who had slipped past his teammates and, in a loping step or two, arriving on time to offer assistance. A famous photograph depicts him jumping almost perfectly vertically, his arm outstretched like an ancient tree branch, blocking a shot that couldn’t possibly, given the distance, be his primary responsibility.
Such was the deep, self-giving morality of Russell’s game, and what made him a natural fit, in his latter years, to serve as a player-coach (not to mention the first Black head coach in any major American pro-sports league): he took every flinching movement or forward advance on the court as his own issue to address. The cost and the substance of his greatness was total awareness, an impossible density of movement and thought. He got so worked up before big games—knowing, surely, how unreasonable it was to do what he did—that, famously, he tended to throw up.
In a 1963 interview with Sports Illustrated, Russell talked about defense with a mind-spanning complexity that suggested how transparent the psychologies of other players were to him:
What I try to do on defense is to make the offensive man do not what he wants but what I want. If I’m back on defense and three guys are coming at me, I’ve got to do something to worry all three. First I must make them slow up or stop. Then I must force them to make a bad pass and take a bad shot and, finally, I must try to block the shot. Say the guy in the middle has the ball and I want the guy on the left to take the shot. I give the guy with the ball enough motion to make him stop. Then I step toward the man on the right, inviting a pass to the man on the left; but, at the same time, I’m ready to move, if not on my way, to the guy on the left.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/bill-russell-was-basketballs-adam