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Bill Simmons: Bigger, Longer, and UncutThe Sports Guy's The Book of Basketball is a crude, fantastic mess.

By Josh LevinPosted Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009, at 4:43 PM ET

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In his foreword to Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball, Malcolm Gladwell compares the 700-page hoops compendium to Bill James' 1980s-era Baseball Abstracts. Just like James' catalogs of baseball arcana, the new book from ESPN.com's Sports Guy is a collection of personal obsessions masquerading as an encyclopedia. To read The Book of Basketball is to brave the depths of Simmons' brain, a tangle of pet theories, personal halls of fame, and anecdotes about the size of Dennis Johnson's member. Yes, Bill Simmons is Bill James with dick jokes.

The Book of Basketball's ascent to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list leaves no doubt that the bard of the beer-and-boobs crowd has also become America's favorite sportswriter. Simmons was the first hugely popular sports columnist who didn't have an editor, or didn't appear to have one. He's a creature built for and attuned to the Web, the inventor of the digressive, referential approach that's become the house style of the sports blogosphere. It took an old-fashioned hardcover, however, to unleash the true, unadulterated Simmons.

Simmons' basketball opus, his first book of predominately new material, is the Sports Guy at his best and worst. Over the course of those 700 pages and more than 1000 footnotes, Simmons' crazed genius and uncommon attention to the NBA stand out. The Book of Basketball mostly fulfills the writer's preposterous aim to relate the entire history of the league, lay out the philosophical underpinnings of winning basketball teams, and rank history's top 96 players. At the same time, The Book of Basketball exacerbates the worst tendencies of a writer who's never mistaken brevity for wit. Simmons luxuriates in the book's wide open spaces, spackling over his hoop thoughts with Teen Wolf analogies and endless references to the legends of pornography. The result is a shaggy, R-rated extension of the Sports Guy's ESPN columns, a frustrating mix of spot-on insights and aggravating shtick.

Consider the section on Moses Malone, part of Simmons' quest to identify the NBA's "pantheon." Simmons makes a surprisingly strong case that Malone, a guy most of us don't consider a hoops icon, is one of the top 12 players in NBA history. The Rockets and Sixers star was the greatest offensive rebounder ever, Simmons argues, thanks to his mastery of the "Ass Attack"—a maneuver in which he'd "sneak under the backboard … slam his butt into his opponent to create the extra foot of space he needed, then jump right to where the rebound was headed." This Ass Attack stuff is fantastic—an evocative, strange, funny, entirely apt sketch of Malone's greatness. Alas, in the same write-up, Simmons sees fit to list dozens and dozens of C-list celebrities who, like Moses Malone, "had one ploy that brought them inordinate success": Michael "Let's Get Ready To Rumble!" Buffer, Jeff Foxworthy, Vanna White, and on and on. He then decrees that Malone was "the Marilyn Chambers of rebounding. He was insatiable." Ladies and gentlemen, this is Bill Simmons' unfiltered internal monologue.

Simmons wouldn't be Simmons without the pointless asides. One of the Sports Guy's biggest flaws, though, is that he tries too hard to entertain: He'd be twice as funny—and a lot less repetitive—with half the jokes. Simmons clearly gets a rise out of mixing sex and sports. Three pages after the Moses Malone-Marilyn Chambers analogy, he says that Shaquille O'Neal is like porn star Peter North—"dominant, but not the best." He also likens Karl Malone to a "fake-boobed Asian stripper" and Jason Kidd to "a smoking-hot girl … wearing a 32A." (The small bra size is a reference to Kidd's poor shooting ability. It kind of makes sense in context.)

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Josh Levin is a Slate senior editor. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.

Photograph of Bill Simmons by David Shankbone, from Wikipedia.

COMMENTS

That's kind of the beauty of Simmon's... His columns are funnier versions of the sports conversations that you have with your friends... At least we have them in my group of friends... We were discussing Simmon's Reggie Cleveland All Stars before we knew/ he was writing about them. Most days reading Simmons is like having a beer with one of my best friends.

-- phunkjnky
(To reply, click here)

Bill James played an enormous role in reshaping how people perceive baseball. And his way of mixing numbers and analysis has spread to other sports. Reevaluating Allen Iverson is the NBA's poster child for a James-esque thinking coming to the NBA.

I enjoy Bill Simmons column, but he makes connections with people through pop culture references, comically absurd analysis (intended) and dick jokes. He is funny.

Bill James and Bill Simmons comparisons stop making sense after you get past they are both named Bill. Thinker vs comedian.

-- emsbrooklyn
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They both wrote very long books about their respective sports, they both told the chronology of the sport, and they both attempted to rank the top 100 (or 96) players of all time.

I do know Bill James and enjoyed his encyclopedia immensely. It's also very funny in a dry, subtle way. I also enjoyed Simmons' book, mess that it was. (Though the chapter on the Secret was pretty terrible, even if the Isiah anecdote was amusing).

spoiler alert!

I was impressed that Bill ranked Larry Bird behind both Kareem and Magic--adds to his credibility.

-- Bentoniani
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