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This Day In Sports: Nothing quite like Bill Russell on the boards

1962: Bill Russell’s signature line in a basketball box score, rebounds, tells the story as Boston wins another crown.

BOISE, Idaho — THIS DAY IN SPORTS…April 18, 1962, 50 years ago today:

In Game 7 of the NBA Finals, league MVP Bill Russell scores 30 points and ties his own postseason record with a staggering 40 rebounds to carry Boston to a 110-107 overtime win over the L.A. Lakers. Russell’s heroics offset 41 points from one-time College of Idaho Coyote Elgin Baylor and 35 more from Jerry West, as the Celtics became the first team to win four straight NBA championships.

Russell was at the peak of his career, and the peak lasted a long time. After leading the University of San Francisco to back-to-back NBA championships in 1955-56, Russell was drafted second overall by Boston. He then led the Celtics to 11 NBA champonships in his 13 seasons with the team. 

And rebounding was a recurring theme. Russell, a five-time NBA MVP, is still the second-leading rebounder in league history with an average (average!) of 22.9 per game. Only rival and close friend Wilt Chamberlain averaged more. And Russell and Chamberlain are the only two NBA players ever to grab 50 or more boards in a single game.

On this day in 1966, Russell became the NBA’s first black coach when he took over the Celtics from the retiring Red Auerbach. He was a player-coach, and the Celtics would win two titles in his three seasons as coach. In 1968, Boston became the first team in NBA Playoffs history to bounce back from a three games-to-one deficit and win a series—they did it against Chamberlain and the Philadelphia 76ers before defeating the Lakers for the championship.

Russell was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame twice, once as a player and once as a coach. As a star Black player in pro sports in the 1950s and 1960s, he experienced plenty of racism. His sometimes militant response to it caused controversy, but his tireless support of the civil rights movement in America earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2011.

(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)

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