bill simmons IS bill simmons IN the book of BASKETBALL

I didn't read the piece but I feel like I've heard that story before in other klosterman books

anyway it's pretty funny that b simmons invites the one writer in america who's capable of making more ham-fisted analogies with pop culture than himself

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6648606/absurdity-nba-half-court-rule

this was the other one i liked--argues that the rule where u can advance the ball to the frontcourt after a timeout in the last two minutes is unique in shortcutting the rules for the sole purpose of creating more excitement.

it's deliberately slight but idk it was something i had never thought about.

anyway it's pretty funny that b simmons invites the one writer in america who's capable of making more ham-fisted analogies with pop culture than himself

― dayo, Tuesday, June 21, 2011 10:47 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

well why do you think simmons reveres him so much!

lol i didn't read that piece but he is otm & it's something i've thought about before

yeah that's a solid piece - nba has a bunch of rules like that one that are meant to facilitate scoring/offense - defensive 3 seconds, no hand checks, no turnover if guarded for 5 seconds like in college, etc

one of the better things simmons has dug up is that this is basically the (awesome) story of the invention of the shot clock! i like that the nba is basically ok changing rules and explaining "this will make it more fun to watch"

yeah soccer could take a note eliminate offsides hint hint

baseball too give every player a gun hint hint

hint hint

wow what is this column http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6693430/painting-nba-trade-picture

i scanned through that, noted that it was certainly written under the influence of cocaine, and moved on with my life.

i think fake trade talk is frivolous fun most of the time, but this is one of the most strained & absurd columns i've ever read

So the Nets turned $1.50 of coins into a $1 bill; they felt like they had to overpay because it was their one chance to acquire paper.

...

exactly.

like i'm sure this all seemed like a good idea in the process of writing it or whatever but don't you step back and look at your insanity now and then and just hit delete

So the Nets turned a roast beef sandwich into a tuna sandwich; they felt like they had to overpay because they were tired of eating roast beef for lunch.

You also have to feel for the Trade Machine, which will spend the summer hanging out on ESPN.com like a bored housewife who never gets hit on, looking sad, wearing tight clothes, and flirting with the pool boy in a desperate attempt to get noticed.

wait is this the O_o 2 thread?

yeah, there's not much to say about that kinda stuff at this point

I'm not sure how having Wes Johnson, Derrick Williams, Lamar Odom, andRon Artest helps them unless they flipped the no. 2 and Odom to Cleveland for the no. 1 and Anderson Varejao (then took Kyrie Irving)

what is this even

an intervention needs to be staged

this coins | money thing is so weird. why do I want to change coins into bills? I can use both at the taco bell?

Without further ado, let's make up 20 fake deals separated into various categories, and let's make sure none of them include the bogus "Monta Ellis for Andre Iguodala" swap, which makes no sense for the simple reason that Monta Ellis is better at basketball than Andre Iguodala. Anyway …

fuck u simmons everyone on ilh signed off on this trade!

ilh has the best posting style, i'll admit

simmons has written as much in the last week as he has in the previous tow years two years, its clearly taking a toll

eh hem, me too

the k-lost piece on the epic junior ND basketball game is good!

The plug for this column on his Twitter was "I can't believe how much time I spent on today's column. It's a staggering opus of inanity. "

Also you all should read the thing where Mike Schur and another dude watch Pakistan and India play Cricket and write a 12,000 word liveblog on it. http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6657523/so-cricket-maybe

With labor trouble threatening the seasons of two of our four major sports, a pair of red-blooded Americans look overseas to fill the potential gap.

i watched some cricket when i was in india, its p fn tedious imho, theyre nuts abt it tho, like there are no other popular sports there as far as i could tell, children walking around w/cricket bats everywhere etc

a programmer i work with was basically useless during that shit!! it was really endearing tbh

oh he's from india, is the point.

apparently there were some crazy upsets but i forget who over whom. the dutch over the jamaicans? or something

When I was in college, I made a friend from Kenya who had never seen a baseball game, and when I asked him what he knew about baseball, he said that there was something called a catcher, and that there was "a man named Griffith Junior" who was supposed to be quite good. I found it endearing.

he tried to explain what was going on and what the drama was -- apparently it's a beat-your-own averages kind of game. the batting order is stacked from best to worst, and uhh you keep hitting for some set amount of balls (6?). so basically you expect your best dudes to knock out all 6... i forget what this means for the running back and forth bit. so it's all about expected pace as the hours go by. i guess.

in the final match india had some top guys really blow it early (i think), so the middle-tier dudes had to step up and play much better. like, we have x balls left and need x(y) runs which isn't usually possible, but they did it.

anyway what i just wrote there is probably about as good as the grantland bit

yeah india made an improbable comeback

foreign stuff, man, what a trip

I imagine how cricket comes across to us is how baseball comes across to foreigners xp

i'll admit that that piece made me read a bunch about cricket on wikipedia

The big upset was Ireland over England iirc - I enjoyed that cricket piece but I suppose I would. Is there anything else worth reading on Grantland? I imagine it as a terrible wasteland.

wait wtf is this trade value in silver dollars piece really

it's just the trade value column (usually good, and a comprehensible gimmick) rewritten four months later with an incomprehensible gimmick

also, almost every "dime" player he calls "fundamentally untradeable" has been traded in the past 0-24 months

uhhhhh David Kahn on the podcast? uhhhhh

2 minutes in and it is already AWKWARD.

*tunes in*

saw that but i'm too scared to listen.

The piece about the writer who used his garage hoop to help get over his dad's suicide felt like it should have been so much better, but that's about par for Grantland - okay writing, but without anything interesting to say.

(also, Skip Bayless is a cunt)

They prove to all middle-American sports fans that "Soccer really IS the beautiful game, a-holes!" (This belief is actually 70 percent of the spirit that has driven the great Northwest Soccer Explosion in MLS.)

i have had this thought, tbh

could someone do a clusterfuck summary of the simmons-kahn podcast? i'm not good with high levels of awkwardness

This is how I heard it, though to be honest I wasn't listening super close after the first few minutes because there was a lack of expected fireworks:

Simmons, when confronted, backs down as always, saying he didn't really say all these horrible things or mean them at any rate. Kahn is professional (and semi-delusional) throughout, backing his statements with plausible if not always defensible outside of his mind reasons. Bill awkwardly tries to rebut a few of them but basically concedes almost everything. What could - and should - have been a somewhat hostile encounter ends up being like him and Isiah Thomas in his book; Bill is cowed and afraid to end in disagreement.

If you want a peak into Kahn's thought process it's interesting. If you want a real discussion of long-term disagreements between the two parties or Kahn to challenge Bill's caricature of him than not really.

It's not as clusterfucky as the podcast with the guy who wrote the ESPN book. That was comedy gold if you wanted to see Simmons unhinged.

thanks!

kahn is a creepy mix of corporate dronespeak and smarminess.

lol so his master plan is to create a smallball team without defined roles

excuse me while i skip back aways but...oh man, americans talking about cricket is always first rate entertainment. i mean, understandably so, it is a truly odd 'game', but that doesn't diminish the fun. you will get closer to the byzantine truth if you just forget baseball at the outset, it is no help here. but then, why bother, cricket will never ever convert anyone that hasn't had it culturally beaten into them. it truly is the sport that defies you to like it.