The Book of Basketball Love him or hate him, you’ve got to respect Bill Simmons’ work. Detractors will say that he’s not a “real” journalist, he sometimes seems to think he’s smarter than everyone else, and he has an insane bias towards Boston. Some (of all) of these may possible be true. What you can’t say about Bill Simmons is that he’s not passionate towards sports… especially NBA basketball. Being a huge NBA fan myself (trust me… there aren’t many of us anymore in Minnesota), I was jacked when I found out Simmons was coming out with a basketball book and especially excited when I found out it was 700 pages. While waiting for my book to arrive from Amazon, I read a bunch of reviews that were either negative or lukewarm. After reading the book, I think the people who are submitting these reviews are a) Simmons fans who don’t like basketball but thought they might try to read a 700 page book about basketball because it was written by Simmons (only to find out later that if you don’t like basketball, you shouldn’t read 700 page books about the subject) or b) morons.

Simmons starts off by talking about his childhood and growing up watching the late 70’s/early 80s Celtics. While I wasn’t sitting courtside at Timberwolves games, I grew up watching games every single Saturday and Sunday on NBC (note to younger folks reading my blog: back in the day, most people didn’t have this thing you call “cable television.” Also, multiple NBA games used to be on TV on both Saturdays and Sundays most Saturdays and Sundays… not just for Christmas and the playoffs).

The basic premise of the book is to be an encyclopedia of basketball according to Bill Simmons. He has one chapter dedicated to great NBA “what-ifs”, another dedicated to the best teams, and the biggest chunk of the book dedicated to making the new NBA hall-of-fame with “levels”.

I found myself disagreeing with Simmons frequently (especially when he made the claim that Smashing Pumpkins might be a better band than Nirvana) and I found myself constantly annoyed by Boston guys being placed an average of 10+ spots too high on the best players ever list.

Overall, I found it an extremely good read. If you aren’t a huge basketball fan, but you’re a huge Simmons fan, you would probably enjoy the first 300+ pages (until he gets into the “pyramid”). I think Simmons’ goal was to make a definitive basketball book. I don’t know if that’s what he’s done here… as much as I’m “pro-blog”, I don’t feel like you can make a definitive book about anything unless you’re an insider. All that being said, though, it’s an extremely readable book. In fact, any book that clocks in at 700 pages that I have an interest in re-reading has to be pretty dang good, right?