(Ballantine/ESPN, 702 pages, $30)
Bill Simmons just might care more about NBA basketball than anybody else cares about anything, said Rob Harvilla in The Village Voice. An unaffiliated Boston-based sports blogger just a decade ago, Simmons today is probably the most popular online sports columnist in America. “Wildly prolific, ceaselessly witty, harmlessly crass, and genuinely wise,” he has “built an everydude empire at ESPN.com” by inviting readers to join an endless hunt for the things that separate winners from losers in a number of major sports. But his new, 700-page treatise on pro basketball leaves no doubt that the NBA game will always be first in his heart. “It’s a hilariously daunting labor of love wherein the love usually manages to overpower the labor.”
Simmons’ apparent ambition is “to settle every hoops debate imaginable,” said Adam Thompson in The Wall Street Journal. So he opens with “a brief (for him)” history of the league, then leaps into a campaign to correct every single MVP award that he considers wrongly awarded. He then ranks and counts down the top 96 players of all time (culminating with Michael Jordan) and the top 20 teams (finishing with the 1986 Celtics)—only it’s not quite that linear. “Digressions pile upon digressions,” with pop-culture references on top of those. He “name-checks” everyone from Jonas Salk to Edgar Allan Poe, and at one point likens Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant to the title character of the Michael J. Fox comedy Teen Wolf. It all reads like his ESPN columns, “but with saltier language.”
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The book’s 700 pages go by surprisingly quickly, said Rod Lockwood in the Toledo, Ohio, Blade. That’s because “Simmons isn’t just writing about basketball, he’s writing about people.” After he establishes early on that “the Secret” to the game is to have players who night after night focus on contributing to the best possible team performance, it’s easy to see why we all should aspire to be more like Bill Russell than Wilt Chamberlain. It’s even possible to see what he means when he says the 1980s basketball career of center Bill Walton (No. 27 on the all-time greats list) parallels the 1990s career of murdered rap star Tupac Shakur. Mostly, it’s a blast just to listen when a “true fan” like Simmons is doing the talking.
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