Bill Simmons tends to be one of those writers that elicits pretty strong opinions by those who encounter his writing. As you may or may not be aware, Simmons is famous for writing on ESPN's Page 2 and more recently for starring in one of the most popular sports podcasts. His schtick is that rather than writing from the perspective of a sports journalist he writes from the perspective of an everyday fan. This results in him being able to take strong, and often biased opinions and he hardly ever tries to be politically correct. Unlike pretty much every ESPN personality he rarely appears on the network, and even actively tries to separate himself from the company. This 'fan friendly' approach is often the source of the bad parts in his writing, but I think it's also what really separates himself from his contemporaries.
In Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs Chuck Klosterman points out that it appears that all sports reporters and writers actually hate sports. This is, he claims, because they get so close to the athletes and day to day operation of sports that they can't help to be disillusioned with what they see. Many athletes are indeed terrible people (as are people in any occupation) and becoming too close to those same people you need to idolize in their reporting eventually breaks down pretty much every sports journalist. Simmons avoids this by staying at arms length from the athletes, owners and coaches involved in professional sports. Although this creates some pretty strong biases in his writing (he's a HUGE Boston fan, which has become insufferable due to all their winning this decade) it actually leaves him less biased than most writers or talking heads when it comes to sports as a whole. He's allowed to call athletes out when they act like knuckleheads, and he's allowed to attack the owners when they act like rich, cheap assholes. By being able to voice his real opinions he fills a much needed gap in sports reporting which too often degenerates into a huge circlejerk between the writers, athletes and everyone else involved.
Although this is technically not his first book (he published one a few years ago about the Red Sox winning the World Series), this is Simmons' first book of almost completely new material. In The Book of Basketball he sets out to redesign the basketball hall of fame (which he finds inadequate) with a tier system and by ranking every player to make it into the hall of fame. His reasoning for doing this is something along the lines of 'why should Micheal Jordon (the best player ever) and Vince Carter (a malcontent and infamous ball hog) both be recognized to the same level'? It's a valid question, and one that should be considered for other sports as well. If the hall of fame is to recognize not only the accomplishments of those who contributed to a particular sport, but also to act as a history museum, shouldn't the levels of those accomplishments be acknowledged?
The Book of Basketball also attempts to answer many questions which Simmons thinks are important to the sport as a whole. There is a whole section dedicated to 'what-ifs' that considers how the league might be different if small (and sometimes huge) things happened differently. But really at the core of this book is something that Simmons calls The Secret. He wants to find out what really is the trick to winning basketball games and championships and what is the 'it' that some players seem to have while others are completely clueless. As he is first told by Isiah Thomas, The Secret is that 'basketball is not really about basketball'.
What Isiah, and pretty much every other great player, understands is that winning basketball games to some degree is not just about who has better players. More than baseball, and possibly rivaling football, basketball is a team sport. It doesn't matter who has the better players as much as you might think, what really matters is having a team that plays well together and having players that can fit certain roles. While this may seem obvious to some people, just watch any NBA game of the past 10 years and you'll see that hardly any players gets The Secret (which I guess is where the name comes from).
Simmons frames the focal point of this argument as whether or not you think Bill Russel or Wilt Chamberlain was the better basketball in the NBA's early years. Do you go with the defensive team minded Russell or the unstoppable scoring machine Wilt (who famously scored 100 points in one game)? As Simmons points out, this is a ridiculous argument seeing that Russel won 11 championships in 13 years, often beating Wilt's teams, while Wilt only won 2 championships his entire career. Why was it that Russell routinely beat Wilt even though Wilt arguably had more skills? According to Simmons, this argument is at the heart of understanding basketball as a whole, and where individual players rank against each other.
Other than these topics, Simmons also attempts to lay out a brief history of the league and the important events that shaped the NBA as we know it today. If this seems like a lot to go over for one book it is. There is a reason the book is 700 pages besides the fact that Simmons feels bad making his readers pay for his writing.
Although he has obviously done his research for the book (and likes to remind you of this fact over and over) the best parts of The Book of Basketball are anecdotes either from Simmons personally or from those he reads/interviews. The beginning sections of the book where Simmons describes going to Celtics games during Larry Bird's prime are absolute gold. You really get a feel of what it felt like to attend those historic games, and makes you yearn for the days before jumbotrons and around the clock sports coverage. Even if the Celtic love can get a little old at times, it's hard not to see how growing up watching that particular team would create an NBA fanatic.
Being only moderately knowledgeable about basketball I found The Book of Basketball to be at the perfect level of depth. However, if you know hardly anything about basketball, or more specifically basketball greats of the past, you might glaze over when Simmons starts his countdown to the greatest players ever. Especially in the lower numbers (he lists the 96 greatest players ever leaving room for current players that don't yet make the cut) I too often found myself in sections of 5 or so players who I had never heard of before. Simmons tries to break this up with humor and funny anecdotes, but many of the older less known players blended together. This is not to say this is his fault, I'm sure someone with more knowledge of basketball history would be much more interested in these sections than I was.
The thing that really keeps this book going is Simmons' patented humor and stories. He fills this book with footnotes (almost 2 a page) and while this makes this book a 'long' 700 pages, they are mostly used to break up the basketball talk. I know it might make me somewhat of a 'dude', but I often find Simmons really, really funny. However it's in this 'dude' quality that I think that the book's weakest moments lie. Seeing that normally he has to listen to ESPNs censors, he really lets himself go with lots of dick and sex jokes. He occasionally makes comments that could be deemed sexist, and while I appreciate him trying to challenge the overly politically correctness of out times, it did occasionally make me cringe. Also a little over the top are his pop culture jokes. He likes to think he's a king of pop culture references, but it's really just Karate Kid, Teen Wolf, and Boogie Nights jokes over and over. I also think he'll regret making references and comparisons to things like The Bachelor, seeing that I don't think these references will age particularly well.
As much as I wish Simmons held back at times, what really makes The Book of Basketball great is his ability to point out which players and teams mattered, and which people had worthwhile personal stories to tell. Simmons turned me own to players who I knew about but never fully appreciated, Bill Walton and Julius Erving to name a few (seriously, who was cooler than Dr. J? See below), and made me realize how much of a team sport basketball really is. I also liked the sections where he would trash players (i.e. Patrick Ewing, Vince Carter, Pete Maravich, all for different reasons) who are often (mistakenly) thought of as all-time greats, especially given that his talents for humor lend themselves to negative criticism. Reading this book has already made me appreciate understand basketball when I watch it much more than I previously have.
On the personal stories front, his discussions on race relations in the early days of the NBA are particularly great, especially given that this too often gets ignored when discussing sports history. His treatment of lives of Elgin Baylor and Oscar Robinson gave me chills, and I'm not the kind of person who throws that term around. If anyone ever wonders why sports matter, I would encourage them to read about the lives of these and other players.
If you're a fan of Simmons, basketball, or sports in general I would say this is a solid 'must read'. He structures it such that if you get bored with a certain section, you can easily skip around and still enjoy the book. Only want to read about players or teams you know? Go ahead, he encourages it. The 'R-rated' humor will cause a few eye rolls, as well as some audible guffaws, but you will finish the book having a much better feeling about why basketball is a great sport, and which players were truly transcendent.
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