bill simmons IS bill simmons IN the book of BASKETBALL

yah its a tough comparison but i think if kobe goes on a run the next few years with a ring or two and consistent finals appearances before he starts to decline, we'll end up looking at the 08 lakers/celts series as the start of the post-timmy era...esp if TD doesn't get another ring before he retires. i tend to think that kobe's first three rings dont count quite as much *for him* in this kind of discussion because he wasn't the undisputed leader of those teams. even more so than points, stats, etc i think thats what simmons convinced me about-- even on the 99 team with robinson, it was absolutely td's team.

This is what is going to make the Western Conf. so interesting this year. They both have good teams and something to prove.

I can't imagine "something to prove" matters as much to Tim as it does to Kobes. I'm not trying to argue Duncan isn't driven or whatever, I just don't think he cares as much about what people think about him. (Tbf, he also doesn't have as much negativity to cope with.)

Yeah. That's probably a pretty fair assessment on both of them.

Have purchased. Have read the first 100 or so pages. Have learned a lot about Boston basketball. Woo, this guy is a HOMER.

http://www.chicagobreakingsports.com/2009/11/espns-simmons-says-86-celtics-better-than-96-bulls.html

What else would you expect from Bill Simmons? ESPN's "The Sports Guy" was in town on Monday promoting his lastest book, "The Book of Basketball," and told the Tribune's Luis Arroyave that it's no contest, the 1986 Celtics were better than the '96 Bulls.

"When Bill Wennington and Luc Longley are your two centers, you're instantly eliminated from being the best team ever," Simmons said.

No contest Robert Parish was a better center than Longley and Wennington. But using that logic, a Bulls fan could counter, no team with Danny Ainge as its shooting guard should ever be mentioned in the argument, since his Bulls counterpart was Michael Jordan.

Plus, Wennington was a backup. Does that mean Bulls fans can bring up Celtics backups Jerry Sichting and Greg Kite, whom the Boston Globe's Bob Ryan once called "the least talented player in the NBA."

Then again Jack Haley was on the '96 Bulls roster.

96 bulls greater than the sum of their parts imo. also 72 wins, gotdamn, ur move simmons.

I'm still pissed they got double-digit losses.they lost against at least one garbage team right near the end.

mj made $290K more than kukoc that season 0_o
their last 2 losses were against raptors (21-61) and hornets (41-41)

yeah jordan was like paid peanuts save for those last 2 years which were like 30 mil a year or something, right?

man do i wish he'd gone through with calling this book "tell me how my book tastes"

Xpost^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Either that title or "Black Men Can Jump." It would have been funny.

Now, look...I'm not a Boston fan. I wasn't when I didn't live in LA, and now I really hate them.

But Ainge back in the day? He was SO fast and really pesky as fuck on defense. I can't take away from him as a player. He wasn't MJ, of course, but the degrees of difference b/t him and MJ and Longley/Wennington v. Parish? No damn contest.

http://deadspin.com/5403430/you-are-not-the-cosmos-a-review-of-bill-simmons-book-of-basketball

i like pierce but there's a lot of bullshit in that review

he comes off with a serious case of U MAD? in that review imo

i've been entangled in a long email back & forth with my friend about simmons as sparked by that piece

pretty much hate this guy but i would like him more if he cut the pop culture/bro shit b/c he can make some interesting points. and sometimes i feel like reading his pieces is like reading [nabisco] on sports.

obv it's a takedown of simmons in the guise of a book review, but he is pretty accurate. dude is so in love with his own hit-or-miss shtick that the worthwhile content sometimes gets buired (xpost: ie what omar said)

altho i don't hate him, i kinda read around it

years of training have left me v. adept at ignoring the pop culture/bro shit.

it's pretty fucking funny for charles pierce to not recognize shtick as such since you know EXACTLY WHAT YOU'RE GETTING when you read both him and simmons.

^^those 2 posts are exactly my response too

yeah i mean, everyone holds up simmons & vegas as like What is Wrong With Simmons (pretty proud of myself here) but shit, if you open that column you know what you're getting. same thing for his fantasy draft columns.

& i don't see why he shouldn't be in love with his own schtick, seeing as it's made him pretty damn popular and has endeared him to a huge fucking audience. and like cad says, it's pretty easy to skip his 580th teen wolf tangent

yeah i mean as a person who has no desire to go to vegas i actually find the vegas columns pretty entertaining as insight into something i will never do. a lot of the crit of simmons seems to be along the lines of "he only writes for people who are like him" which is only true if you just kind of reject a certain strain of dude lifestyle totally out of hand.

basically i say that he's the apatow movies of sportswriting - yeah other writers may make you think more or may be more impressive, but when it comes to big budget bang for your buck entertainment, it's hard to beat simmons

yeah i mean as a person who has no desire to go to vegas i actually find the vegas columns pretty entertaining as insight into something i will never do. a lot of the crit of simmons seems to be along the lines of "he only writes for people who are like him" which is only true if you just kind of reject a certain strain of dude lifestyle totally out of hand.
--omaha deserved 311 (call all destroyer)

yeah this

sort of shocked that a book abt basketball could be a #1 best seller

btw http://intothemusic.ca/images/uploads/covers/Bell_Chris_-_I_Am_The_Cosmos.jpg

<3 that album

TBH, I kind of treat Simmons as a guilty pleasure, and get a little embarassed when he comes up in conversations. I guess its because the Bill we see, who I doubt is what the real Bill Simmons is like regardless of how much he talks about his wife or his family, is one that is cultivated to attract people to read his discussions about sports.

His knowledge of sports, and in particular pro basketball, is pretty impressive, and he makes some interesting arguments and analyses of certain sports topics, but its all delivered with the pop culture references and bro-down stories that his core readership thrives on.

These are, of course, the same people who recite movie lines as jokes, and expect to therefore be regarded as funny.

he comes off with a serious case of U MAD? in that review imo

― house of flying jaggers (J0rdan S.), Friday, November 13, 2009 1:43 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i liked when i got to the end and see his credits that basically say I AM A BITTER RAGEFUL SPORTSWRITER

anyway re: this book - i love simmons when he talks basketball (and basically ignore him when he talks about anything else) so this seems like a great idea to me - i'll deffo read it someday - and honestly, i can probably count on one hand the number of sportswriters i consider better than him (nb. this is more an indictment of sportswriting than an endorsement of simmons)

I ended up really liking this, and the race stuff I mentioned upthread got put into context almost immediately after I posted that, and it made way more sense by the time I finished. Overall the time he spent writing about race + discrimination issues wound up being one of the most thoughtful parts of the book.

For some reason I thought the pyramid would turn out to be a total Ronald Thomas Clontle routine, but Simmons spends a lot of time trying to articulate a bigger point: that basketball fans have short memories, sure, but also that a lot of the measures of greatness in this sport rely more on subjective analysis and intangibles - since not only is the sport constantly evolving and changing its own rules in a way that, say, baseball isn't, but that the markers of greatness often manifest themselves in things that aren't obvious if you only rely on box scores and highlights to analyze performance. (Cf. "The Secret," etc, but the stuff about the ABA's struggle to get TV coverage and its subsequent effect on how ABA players were perceived relative to their NBA peers is really fascinating.)

I realize that all sounds kinda corny, but Simmons is very good at writing this kind of sports pop science, and while this book definitely didn't need to be 700+ pages, it's surprising how much of what he threw out there sticks.

Also it made me wish somebody with his exact level of access/obsession would write a similar book about NCAA basketball.

wishing Michael Lewis would write a book about basketball

His Battier piece was pretty good but I don't know if he could sustain an entire book without just rewriting Moneyball.

love the book, but ranking paul pierce and parish that high is some pretty serious homerism. and in the whole list of 96 there's no room for any of the '04 pistons? there's room for big shot rob but no finals mvp chauncey billups? they were only the best/most consisten team in the east this decade.

the human beans story otoh makes me pretty happy

I am absolutely LOVING this book, and I'm not even much of a basketball fan! Simmons makes me laugh.

It was hit or miss with me, until he started describing the hall of fame inductees. I stayed up WAY past my bed time last night reading it. Really good.

Simmons was banned from twitter for two weeks by ESPN because he talked shit about some Boston radio station.

lol know what i might say to espn had i the #1 bestseller

First ESPN totally assrapes Simmons by not letting Obama onto his podcast, and now this. Assholes.

I read this whole thing. I love how he rates The Answer.

i read this over thanksgiving break. i don't know anything about basketball so i can't dispute his knowledge there. he's an entertaining writer and occasionally very funny (his section on great basketball players who made shitty announcers/commentators made me LOL). this may be an obvious thing to say about a 700-pg book but he needs better editing, it got really repetitive by the end (making the same points and jokes over and over) and was just too long in general. also a lot of his pop culture references are so dumb and/or wrong. i enjoyed the book though.

^^kinda sums up how i feel about his writing, in general. i am not a sports guy (lol) and rarely ever know who he's talking about or why it ought to be funny, but sometimes a lot of his jokes work without that, which i think is a credit. or i'm just easy, and the kind of person who laughs if someone gets the delivery and misses the punchline

oddly his pop culture analogy that made me the most mad was comparing the development of basketball to the development of comedy, saying if you listen to woody allen and bob newhart routines they won't make you LOL because comedy wasn't as advanced as in the '80s. i was like "nah brah" but then again i am weird and old-fashioned about comedy i guess, i love old woody allen and newhart stuff :/

if there is def one thing bill simmons is consistently wrong about, it's other people's comedy. in that, i think a lot of the comedic pop cultural stuff he mentions off-hand in his columns is sort of milquetoast or outright bad, though he himself can make a good joke

then again, i couldn't possibly think of a specific example of this, so i might be making it up.

i just picture him laughing his ass off at some current standup while i look disgusted

he probably rates dane cook as G.O.A.T.

nah I wouldn't go that far. i'd put my money on will ferrell. def agree with gbx on this tho.

my post wasn't to allege that bill is a bad boss, just that it's funny when he has his writers on his podcast and reveals that he doesn't know what they're publishing, even though that is a fairly standard dynamic at a place w/ as many editorial layers as the ringer. it's just that most places like the ringer don't have a hugely popular podcast where its founder speaks frequently w/ his writers

that being said i know enough ppl that have worked for him to say definitively that whether he is a bad boss or a good boss depends on who you are talking to. there is a core group of people who have been w/ him for ages, there are also people who have found working for him untenable and have parted on bad terms. this is prob a fairly common dynamic among bosses.

why do the untenable people find it untenable

i don't think you have to know anyone behind the scenes to say that bill can be petty and vindictive. he deals w/ conflict in a way that can feel righteous when his opponent is ESPN and disney -- it's far more problematic when he is managing employees. i know that when the ringer union was forming, some people who were very active & vocal in the union drive felt that he was doing stuff like no longer tweeting out links to their stories from his personal account etc. boss fighting union is not exactly a breaking news story but there were some ppl there who felt like he was taking it to a more personal level

there's also just stuff like, the ringer having very few black people on staff, bill being confronted about this by his staff, and then his response being to hire ppl like raja bell and cc sabathia to host podcasts. like...

Above all, the four former employees said, it was difficult for black staff members to win more responsibility and visibility at the company — especially since late 2017, when company leaders appeared to make podcasting a priority. At that point, they said, top editors started claiming shows for themselves.

The outlet’s popular R3w4tch4bl3s podcast, in which staff members revisit old movies, led by Mr. Simmons, allowed for a variety of guests when it started. By the spring of 2018, the ensemble approach faded as the show came to rely more on Mr. Simmons along with S34n F3nn3ss3y and Chr1s Ry4n, both founding editors who are white.

“The Rewatchables was pitched as, ‘Let’s get the rest of you participating in podcasts,’” Mr. Collins said. “It very quickly became Sean, Bill and Chris.”

Mr. Simmons said by email that the company needed to spotlight its best podcasters. “It’s a business,” he said. “This isn’t Open Mic Night.”

responding to concerns by your (at the time) handful of black employees that there wasn't enough room for advancement by saying, to the new york times, that you aren't hosting an open mic night is a style of management that, um, isn't going to work for everyone. again this is the kinda thing that works when you're the david, not the goliath. but i think he always sees himself as the former despite having been the latter for quite some time.

good post thank you