Take a look what i just found at amazon:
Their description:
Product Description
There is only one writer on the planet who possesses enough basketball knowledge and passion to write the definitive book on the NBA.* Bill Simmons, the from-the-womb hoops addict known to millions as ESPN.com’s Sports Guy, is that writer. And The Book of Basketball is that book.
Nowhere in the roundball universe will you find another single volume that covers as much in such depth as this wildly opinionated and thoroughly entertaining look at the p… More >>
Go & get it here - i can recommend it:
The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy
This is my final foray into Bill Simmons who completes his long decline from innovative and interesting sports writer to celebrity wannabe with this piece of dreck disguised as a book.
Endless footnotes (The reason books have pages in order is so that one doesn’t have to flip back and forth seven times for every page), his banal opinions on a sport that he thinks he’s an expert in (despite being wrong in so many predictions, you’d be hard pressed to wonder why he gets paid to write about the sport)
I used to look forward to every Friday column, and now (somewhat) sadly have decided to move on after reading this monstrosity of a “book”.
Now before you jump down my throat, I’m a fan of Bill Simmons Page 2 Column. I mean how can you not like a guy who looks like he’s high in his publicity photo? His columns are the best because of a variety of factors, but chief among them is their brevity. Even at his wordiest he maxes out at maybe four or five pages.
This book is over 700 pages long! 700 pages! The Bible isn’t even that long and it goes back millions of years!
I only made it 70 to 80 pages in before my nose started bleeding. I mean, how much is there to say about basket ball? Dribble dribble, shoot, score. Dribble dribble, shoot, score. Dribble dribble, foul, dribble, shoot score. The most points wins. This book lists about a 100 of the best players in history…. Sure it was interesting, and I’d be hard pressed to argue his rankings and choices, but Holy Mary Mother-of-God the paragraphs were miles long! He could have filled the entire Pacific Ocean with the volume of words he used. And he used big words, like “burgeoning” and “significance” and he even makes up words like, “demeanor” when he really means “the mean one”.
One last thing… footnotes…. So not only is the reader punished with 700 pages of material to slog through, but then there are micro paragraphs at the bottom of almost every page… if you made those paragraphs regular sized I bet this mammoth book would weigh in at 1,400 pages, or maybe even twice the original size!
Please Mr. Simmons, I love your columns and your writing, but next time can you limit the number pages to maybe 20? Or if you must go longer, insert captions that tell the reader, “You can take a break and read more later”, or “it’s ok to use a bookmark” or even, “Now go to the bathroom”. That last one could have saved me a set of bed sheets.
Keep in mind when reading this that there are the Celtics and no one else ever played basketball but them, according to this author. Would have liked more Laker stuff, especially Magic… instead of insulting Kareem. Just don’t have a sense of humor for it. Ok, book Remember, Simmons called “Maravich” better researched…..more like wrongly researched. So follow this with a grain of salt as well
I am a Celtics fan and this book makes me angry. It is not a fair treatment of the sport or those who support the concept of fair play. Simmons sucks up to Barkley like no other. He mixes up the Malones and their contributions. His treatment of John Stockton is absolutely without any insight. He makes light of Magic’s health problems. Isiah Thomas must have something on author Simmons. Without wasting any more time, the only good thing about the book was the introduction by Malcolm Gladwell. sports guy? espn?
The good: Incredibly entertaining. A must read and definitely a gift for any basketball fan. His style of argumentation is compelling yet not bland. He weaves a narrative of a particular thesis (e.g. this guy is awesome) then seamlessly transitions into the antithesis (e.g. but here are his faults) and finally guides his reader to the synthesis (Mr. Simmons’ viewpoint of that person’s/team’s ranking). He succeeded in convincing me 90% of the time and when he didn’t, I didn’t find his view absurd. Considering the task (ranking all the players and all the teams while dropping some recondite yet interesting facts), Mr. Simmons accomplishes his goal superbly. The degree of difficulty alone would ratchet up his score but his execution definitely gets style points; thus he gets 5 stars. Bravo, Sports Guy!
The bad: The grammar errors. I know this is pedantic, but you’re a professional writer for pete’s sake. Your editor should be fired. Seriously, I’m not a grammar freak (there are probably a few in my review) but the number of misplaced modifiers, parallelism errors, etc. was astounding. Is Bill much like the players of the late 90s he so often maligns: all talent with little to no fundamentals? Is Holy Cross not that good of a school? Tisk tisk, Mr. Simmons.
The Ugly: I now wonder whether Mr. Simmons is slightly racist. Always dismissed that criticism of Boston but after reading Bill’s book, I wonder whether Jabaal Abdul ranks in the top five “contrivances used to cover up bostonian racism.” For now, I’m going to chalk it up to the PC ether clouding my lens, but some of the stuff he says might give you pause. On a scale of 1 to Imus, he never goes higher than a 6…at least explicitly.