Between 1957 and 1969, if you wanted to stop the Boston Celtics from winning the NBA championship, you had to stop Bill Russell. Most teams couldn't. But even the few who could slow Russell still had to deal with Sam Jones — and the bank shot that nobody in the sport could figure out how to guard.
Sam Jones won ten NBA championships. He is second only to Bill Russell in all-time championship rings. He played quietly alongside the greatest winner in basketball history, and he was crucial to every one of those titles.
The Bank Shot That Changed Everything
Sam Jones' signature weapon was not a fadeaway or a stepback or a pull-up jumper. It was the bank shot — the ball arcing off the backboard at an angle that Jones had calculated with a geometric precision defenders could not replicate. He used it from everywhere: the elbow, the mid-range, the corner. And because it came off the glass rather than the rim, it went in when ordinary jumpers would have rattled out. Guards who had taken the angle away still watched the ball bank in off the board. There was no defensive answer for a shot that ignored conventional geometry.
Ten Championships in the Shadow of Greatness
The difficulty of Sam Jones' legacy is inseparable from where he played. Ten championships in twelve seasons is extraordinary by any measure, but it happened alongside Bill Russell and Bob Cousy and John Havlicek, in a dynasty so complete that supporting players' contributions were sometimes absorbed into the collective excellence. Jones was named to five All-Star teams, averaged 17.7 points per game across his career, and delivered game-winning shots in multiple Finals series. In 1966, he averaged 23.5 points per game — more than Russell, more than Havlicek. The team won another championship.
Red Auerbach described Jones as the player who made the dynasty possible in the way every great team has a player like this: the one who takes over when the star cannot, who closes games when the defense has adjusted, who scores thirty points without making the evening about himself. He was, Auerbach said, the best clutch player he ever coached.
The Quiet Greatness
Sam Jones was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1984. His #24 was retired by the Celtics as part of a franchise that understood, even if the broader basketball public sometimes forgot, that ten championships do not happen without exceptional players at every position. The bank shot lives in the memory of every Celtic fan who watched it go in at the most important moments. The rings, all ten of them, are the permanent record of what it accomplished.
