bill simmons IS bill simmons IN the book of BASKETBALL

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.

while i am here i will say that although i was finally done with simmons a while ago now, despite my boston-biased efforts to hang in there, i kinda did want grantland to come off but it seems pretty terrible so far and i have decided i would at least enjoy a crash and burn if not actively root for it.

hey man i tried, gimme a break.

and believe me 'forgetting about baseball' is not hard for me to do

in conclusion, as a guy who works in a large corporate environment i am extremely glad i do not work with david kahn.

i have run into guys like that and they are deeply uncool.

huh, one of the founders of the awl (the publisher david cho) is going to grantland

i feel like for every person he hires that i like hes planning on hiring another person that i hate

The Lorne Michaels theory

wow theres a buttload of people writing for this site huh

bill simmons on ryan reynolds

thought that was a pretty interesting article

even if you need to strip away the "how hollywood is like the nba" arc

i do not need a ryan renolds themed bill simmons think pece in my life, i do not need it!

the will smith part is pretty otm actually

i do not need a ryan renolds themed bill simmons think pece in my life, i do not need it!

Grantland.com succinctly summarized

i feel like for every person he hires that i like hes planning on hiring another person that i hate
― ☂ (max), Wednesday, June 29, 2011 4:58 PM

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmhb7goxVB1qa9bmvo1_400.png    LaBeouf

lol

muniz

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6708682/the-math-problem

too easy i guess but i'm surprised we didn't take a doodoo on this one

it was way, way too easy

i mean, i'm sympathetic to the position but it was just a dumb article.

that piece has been savaged all over the place

http://deadspin.com/5819051/dear-grantland-your-motto-is-wrong

this is really damning & unbelievable -- i can tell you from experience that editing is really not that hard, and even less hard is setting up a system so that you don't have a myriad of typos in your articles, especially when you have an unlimited budget and especially when you're posting like 3 stories a day, most of which aren't even much more than 1,000 words long. some of this shit is just embarrassing.

yeah agreed

i will use this forum to offer my services as grantland copy editor--i only ask that they match my current salary and never make me meet bill simmons in person.

can't match your current salary but I can offer you a substantial share in the toronto raptors organization and only a 5% chance of ever meeting bill simmons in person

i will have to discuss with my accountant and my attorney