The Book of Basketball

Bill Simmons is a man who needs no introduction. So instead, here's a personal take on the guy. I read Simmons' stuff all the time. Literally, everything he writes, I read, and recently I've even taken to listening to his podcasts. Having said all of this, I don't think he's a talented writer. He's funny, sure, but some of his jokes and pop culture references fall flatter than pancakes, and he all too often rambles on and on for far too long (admittedly, I am guilty of this myself). And that's the biggest problem with this book. It's 700 pages long. It took me a month to read it, and again, I read Bill Simmons' work all the time. If I could read an equally long Richard Dawkins book in half that amount of time, then clearly, Simmons wrote a real snoozer. Sorry Bill, but somewhere around the 500th page, I just stopped giving a shit. This may have had something to do with you spending eight (8!) pages debating both sides of the argument, "Karl Malone and Charles Barkley: which one was the 18th best player of all time, and who was merely 19th?" No one cares! Not even Chuck and the Mailman themselves. (Oh no, I'm starting to write like Bill Simmons - addressing him in the second person like that. And, shit, the parenthetical citation of my mistake is also eerily similar to his style. Wait, no it's not - I use parentheses all the time to second guess myself.) The Book of Basketball was interesting and insightful enough for the first 250 pages, and the final 80 weren't so bad either. But here's the problem: smack dab in the middle, Simmons spends nearly 400 pages ranking the top 96 basketball players of all time. (Not 100 - Bill's defense for this was something like, "I'm reserving four spots for young guys like Kevin Durant." Why bother? When it's time for Kevin Durant to break into the "Pyramid" - more on this later - won't there be newer, younger guys who also deserve future spots?) Now, about that "Pyramid." Simmons thinks the NBA Hall of Fame is flawed, and wants to blow it up and start a new one, called the "Pyramid," in Indiana. In a nutshell, his Pyramid has five tiers (1, 2, 3, 4, and Pantheon) that rank the players into distinct levels of greatness. He spends a good eighteen pages explaining the idea and another three or four congratulating himself for coming up with it. (No, I'm not kidding). Here's something he overlooked though: it doesn't make sense. Here are the number of guys he places in each tier, respectively: 35, 25, 12, 12, and 12. Does that sound like a Pyramid to you? Because I'm picturing a vertical tower with a wide base. Man, he really pisses me off sometimes. Why get all excited over your own dumb flawed idea? What a fucking idiot. It's fine if he wants to break players down into strangely-assorted tiers, but man, don't call a tower a pyramid. Furthermore, why group players into tiers at all if you're going to rank them numerically from 1-96? So, #12 and #1 are on the same level, but #12 is a whole tier better than #13? It makes no sense. Nothing about his fucking pyramid makes any sense. Man, I am really going off on him, I know, but come on. Don't spend three years writing a book and calling it the best thing you've ever written when more than half of it - half! - is devoted to an awful concept that you never even worked the kinks out of. The best part about his 400-page "pyramid" tower is that, by the end of it, there are like two typos per page. Yes, in the pages describing Michael Jordan (spoiler alert: he's #1!), it's clear that even Simmons and his editor didn't feel like reading on. I'm not making this up, either - in describing the best player of all-time (presumably the most important park of his book), Simmons shits the bed with grammar mistakes, refers to players by the wrong names, and uses the word "to" twice in a row. Look, I may be nitpicking, but I'm not the one who wrote a 700-page book and didn't bother to check the most important section for mistakes. Come on. The last 20 pages of the book are entertaining, as Simmons puts together the best 12-man team of all time. We're allowed to take 12 NBA players from any point in history. The twist is, Martians are invading the Earth and we need to beat them in a basketball game or else we get annihilated. By the way, he never once admits that he's hijacking the central conflict in Space Jam. Not once. Now, one of Simmons' recurring themes of the book to this point has been, "don't forget about the great players and teams of yesteryear." He then proceeds to use '09 players - not just active players, but '09 players - for three of his twelve picks. He similarly contradicts his "never forget history" cause in the "most invincible teams of all time" chapter in which he says, right off the bat, that no pre-1976 team can qualify. (He also tosses away all post-Jordan teams for an even vaguer reason.) The whole book just left a sour taste in my mouth. And honestly, that's what I've come to expect from Simmons. (Remember, in my own introduction to this recap, I stated that I didn't think he was a great writer.) His gimmick is getting old for me, I guess. (That gimmick: Boston-area frat guy loves sports and pop culture, forms opinions and theories largely for the sake of forming outlandish opinions and theories, gets beaten by his wife at betting on NFL lines yet routinely offers gambling advice on the subject, and has lived in L.A. for several years but still thinks he's a genuine Bostonian.) Whatever. If you're in the mood for a highly-opinionated (which is okay; it's his book, after all) and way-too-long (not okay; keep it simple, stupid) book, give this one a shot. Just don't expect to learn anything new or insightful about the history of the game itself. Just which players and teams mattered in the eyes of its author.