The spiciest debate in professional sport, I would argue, is whether Michael Jordan or LeBron James is the greatest basketball player to ever live.

Passionate NBA fans across generations will fight you over this question — at least on social media. Fans of no other sport are so consumed with determining their Goat. Not baseball, not American football, not football, not golf, not tennis. That the NBA season is now over, with a new champion crowned, will silence no one: the NBA is always on.

Hoops fans stay up late and get up early with swagger in their souls. A moist match could ignite basketball’s Goat debate. Recently, Jordan’s longtime agent, David Falk, said at a sports business conference that if his former client had “cherry-picked” his teams, as LeBron has, and joined up with other superstars during free agency, Jordan would have won 15 championships — instead of the already-amazing six he did win.

That brought a clapback from James’s business partner, Rich Paul, who said on The Rich Eisen Show that Falk himself was the beneficiary of cherry-picking, in that the biggest college coaches sent their top players to him for representation. Paul went on to make clear that, although he greatly admires Jordan, “Michael never had a 24-hour, 365-day news cycle. He never had shows built strictly to criticise him. People made millions of dollars criticising LeBron James. That was their entire job. And when you talk about the difficulty of it all, Michael played for Dean Smith, Michael played for Phil Jackson, and Michael had Jerry Krause.”

In other words, Jordan had Hall of Fame coaches and an extraordinary Chicago Bulls general manager to help ensure his greatness. But rest assured: the argument will go on.

Digital culture has conditioned us to rank everything and everybody. We’re fed an endless stream of alluring lists: the best rooftop bars, the trendiest boutique hotels, the crispiest fried chicken, the ten most gorgeous mountain views. I like lists. Complex recently put out a list of the 50 Best LA Rappers of All Time. I raced through it to see who got crowned No 1. It was Kendrick Lamar. Naturally, there was a strong reaction. The Game, a rapper upset that he was ranked No 11, created his own list, on which he put himself No 5.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the meaning of greatness, how we should assess it, and why the debate even matters. What criteria do we use? We throw around words without bothering to define them. For example, the NBA Finals featured two huge young talents: Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the quiet, silky smooth, hyperefficient MVP who just signed a $285 million contract extension, and Indiana’s Tyrese Haliburton, the unorthodox, super-clutch team leader who tragically tore his Achilles tendon in the pivotal Game 7 that decided the championship. And there was an actual debate about whether Haliburton, a back-to-back All-NBA selection, was a “superstar”. The noun itself was put under a microscope. What does it mean to be a superstar? Do you have to carry a team on your back? Consistently average big numbers? Sell out arenas and have fans travel to see you play?

It is the same with “greatness”. I sometimes play the Mount Rushmore game with friends and family. Who’s on your Mount Rushmore of quarterbacks? (Mine: Brady, Montana, Manning, Mahomes.) Who’s on your Mount Rushmore of comedians? (Mine: Pryor, Murphy, Rock, Chappelle.) My selections are not based purely on stats, accolades or popularity, but rather on my own unscientific judgment of achievement — I like aura — mixed with personal taste.

Rather than settle the Goat debate — an impossibility — I would like to expand it to include non-basketball factors of greatness. Bravery, perseverance, excellence amid loneliness, and grand accomplishment under extreme pressure, including death threats. Yes, I’m talking about Bill Russell.

I recently watched Celtics City, the nine-part documentary series on the Boston Celtics, brilliantly directed by my former ESPN colleague Lauren Stowell. The early episodes heavily feature Russell, who won a record 11 NBA championships, averaged 22.5 rebounds a game and is considered one of the premier defensive players of all time. Russell defined how defence is played as a big man and was an expert shot blocker before the NBA kept those statistics.

The series is a reminder of all that Russell endured while leading the greatest dynasty in basketball. When he began his career with the Celtics in 1956, he was the team’s only Black player. In Boston, he entered the shadow of guard Bob Cousy, on a team synonymous with coach Red Auerbach. But Cousy and Auerbach didn’t win championships until Russell got there, and the Celtics kept winning titles with Russell after Cousy retired and Auerbach stopped coaching. When Red went to the front office in 1966, Russell took over as player-coach, becoming the league’s first Black head coach.

Russell was great during a time of segregation and what he described as Boston’s “flea market of racism”, a period in which fans called him “coon,” “baboon,” and “n****r” during games. His home was burglarised: the vandals spray-painted racial slurs on the walls, smashed his trophies and defecated in his bed. He was an outspoken participant in the civil rights movement. He stood up for other Black athletes — notably Muhammad Ali, who was stripped of his heavyweight boxing title and convicted of draft evasion for refusing to join the Army during the Vietnam War.

Police hounded Russell even though he was a star, and in some Boston-area communities, no one would sell him a house. “I’ll never forget having to drive through the day and night to get someplace, ignoring the cries of my still-young children, because there was no place to stop to eat or rest, no hotel or restaurant that would accept our Blackness,” Russell wrote in a powerful 2020 essay for Slam magazine. “None of my medals or championships could shield my children from White supremacy.”

Russell’s force of will, his moral commitment to doing what was right, and the consistency of his success despite living in and playing for a place that often treated him degradingly all burnish his claim to being the greatest. And 11 rings are 11 rings. Who’s a bigger winner, under more stressful circumstances, than Bill Russell? It’s time to stop and reassess Russell’s greatness under a new category: degree of difficulty.

I have long admired Russell. Some years back, I received as a gift a signed paperback copy of his 1968 memoir, Go Up for Glory, and it remains one of my prized possessions. But how easily we forget. In fact, until Celtics City, I’m ashamed to say, I had pretty much stored Russell’s career on my bookshelf. Time will treat unfavourably even the best of the best. I don’t like that about time: how it inevitably looks at you with unimpressed eyes and a short memory.

I don’t know how much LeBron James cares whether he is crowned the unquestioned Goat some day. I suspect he cares a lot. He deserves to be fully in the conversation with Jordan, who seems not to be preoccupied with the debate at all. But why only those two names? I’m for widening the field: put Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the conversation for sure; put Steph Curry in as well. Add other names to your heart’s content.

As an active player approaching the end of his career, LeBron is surely contemplating how he will sign off. He recently commented that there was too much focus on “ring culture”; not all great players have championships on their résumés. Steve Nash and Charles Barkley, for instance, should be revered for their greatness despite their ringless fingers. LeBron suggested it makes no sense that Dan Marino, arguably the greatest pure passer in NFL history, is not discussed in the same conversation with Tom Brady simply because he never won a ring.

Hoops fans were ready with the side-eye. After all, who has chased rings harder than LeBron? Trailing Jordan in the ring race, King James is eager to contend for another championship before his career ends. As usual, there is speculation that LeBron might be open to a trade or look to move on from the Los Angeles Lakers in pursuit of ring No 5.

He will find out soon enough that the longer you are gone from the game, the harder it is to claim, or hold on to, the mantle of Goat. Interestingly, Jordan — a man who plays chess, not checkers, when it comes to fame — will return to the game next season as a special contributor for NBC, which has a new broadcast deal with the NBA, ensuring his continued relevance in the public eye.

No such opportunities are available to Bill Russell. His campaign is over, and his case speaks for itself. As a player, he was inarguably one of the greatest — yet even greater as someone who soared beyond basketball to leave his mark on humanity.

• Kevin Merida is an independent journalist, storyteller and media executive. He is the former executive editor ofthe Los Angeles Times, a former senior-vice president at ESPN, and a former managing editor of The Washington Post