SOMETIMES you don’t need to be a talented player to win a title in team sports.
That is if you have a star athlete or two for a teammate.
You only need to be lucky and be in the right place at the right time.
The late basketball journeyman Cris Bolado is one example, snaring numerous championships in the local professional league with nine teams from 1994-2003.
In the history of the American league National Basketball Association, several fringe players (or so-called “role” players) from the Boston Celtics captured titles by simply hopping onto the broad shoulders of my GOAT Bill Russell during his illustrious 13-year pro tenure from 1956-57 to 1968-69.
Chief of the lot was rugged James Loscutoff, a menacing 6-foot-5 enforcer who endeared himself to the Celtics faithful with his hard-driving physical moves.
“Jungle Jim” won six titles in 1957, 1959, 1961, 1962, 1963 and 1964 with the Hub City outfit. (He missed the 1960 playoffs – which also resulted in an NBA championship for Boston – due to an injury.
How lucky Loscutoff was in comparison to fellow Celtics alumni Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, both Hall of Famers who each won only three rings (1981, 1984 and 1986) as teammates.
Even Bill Sharman, who was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1976 as a player (Boston) and in 2004 as a head coach (having steered the Los Angeles Lakers to a 69-13 regular-season finish in 1971-72 and rewarding Tinseltown with its first NBA crown since moving out of Minneapolis in 1960), earned only four rings in 1957, 1959, 1960 and 1961.
Russell, as if you don’t know, is the winningest player in NBA history with 11 championships in 12 trips to the NBA Finals.
The defense-oriented 6-foot-10 Russell initially powered Boston to the mountain top in 1957 as a rookie pro out of the University of San Francisco. He subsequently romped away with eight straight titles from 1959 to 1966 – the longest championship streak in league annals – before winning twice more in 1968 and 1969 as a playing coach with the Celtics.
Russell tasted defeat only once during the NBA Finals. This came in 1958 when the Celts were beaten by co-Hall of Famer Bob Pettit and the St. Louis (now Atlanta) Hawks in six games during their best-of-seven titular showdown.
In honor of the legendary Celtics great, the NBA Finals Most Valuable Player hardware has been called the Bill Russell trophy since 2009.