Bill SimmonsBesprekingen

Sometimes, I love Bill Simmons. Sometimes, I hate him. He's lived such a charmed life and has a "job" so many people would love to have. He's become a celebrity from just watching sports and celebrities.

He can be really funny. And Really smart. And just evil at times. His love affair with Boston sports is nauseating.

But ya know, I do read most of his columns and mostly enjoyed this book. If you do like basketball, sit down and read this book. He comes across as a know-it-all that you want to just beat in your fantasy league. But as long as he's not picking on you like Isiah Thomas or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, you will find some of his ideas great and some ideas that make you want to punch him in the face.

Gift from Jim while I was in college. Read on the trip to Portland with the Dordt basketball team. Loved almost every minute of it. Would read again if he does an updated version every 10 years. Definitely agree with his idea of doing a complete overhaul of the basketball hall of fame and utilizing the pyramid scheme. Also explains in detail why Lebron is not the GOAT based on what Bill Simmons calls, "the secret.". This was also my first introduction to Bill Simmons. I enjoy him as a writer, not as much as a commentator.

Simmons is, of course, a biased commentator, so don't come to this book as if he's even trying to be fair. His loves--the Celtics, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan--and his hates--Wilt Chamberlain, the Lakers, Kareem--he wears on his sleeve. But most prominent of all is his deep love of the game itself, and that's what really makes this book worthwhile. Simmons is someone who is passionate enough about basketball to make even his blind spots fun. I say this as someone who despised his beloved Celtics (being from Philly).

He knows a great deal. He wonders about many things. And he combines the two to make even the silly stuff interesting.

Each summer we in the United States go from having 3 great sports to watch and talk about, to having one okay sport. But sports television keeps going for 24 hours a day. I watch sports TV with lunch, but in summer, it's so boring that I often end up doing the dishes instead.

For the last three years, I've spent my summer lunches going through this book. Simmons is better than most sports journalists inasmuch as he can write more than one sentence without making me cringe, and he has a sense of humor. Is that worth 700 pages? It if you're reading it over three years. It is not if you think these sorts of things should be 'objective,' which is ridiculous.

Well, this is not objective, and who cares, it's *freaking sports people, one small step up from daytime soap operas in terms of importance*. One fairly embarassing problem with this book, though. Allow me a digression.

I had a friend in high school who, for some reason, had an extremely upper class English accent. Was he English? No. He wasn't faking it either. But it made him stand out among the rest of us, all proud strines ('Australian'). To fit in, he tried to swear a lot. It was even worse than the original accent. Imagine if someone in the middle of a BBC mini series suddenly started calling the women bitches.

I bring this up because Simmons, too, tries to fit in, only in his case he's trying to fit in with a very blokey sports culture. So every second page has a story about a strip club, or how women should stay in the kitchen, or how WNBA isn't basketball. Bill Simmons: any WNBA player could beat you at basketball, and any WNBA player could beat you in a fight. So could any stripper. Please stop with the "I'm just one of the guys" shtick. It's embarrassing for you, and more than a little demeaning to, well, all women.

But as I mentioned, this is a book about basketball. It is entertainment, and that is all. No need to get too upset.

Bill Simmons's writing is a little self-indulgent for me, but it was nice to relive the 2004 season. Best part was his footnote about Afleet Alex.

Definitely increased my bball knowledge and was more able to appreciate/ put into perspective the games that I had watched as a kid. Its too bad I can only appreciate bird and other old timers through YouTube. Couple this book an YouTube = endless enjoyment!

700 pages is too long, and I wound up skipping some parts. The 80 percent of the book that I did read was a lot of fun. I learned some cool NBA history and Simmons is hilarious.

I loved this book. I will admit I am a fan of Bill Simmons, so take this review how you'd like, but I feel like people take him too seriously and let it taint the book for them. There's plenty to disagree with, plenty to get annoyed at (I'm a Sixers fan reading from an unapologetic Celtics fanboy), and plenty to find funny and even enlightening. You just have to know not to take him as some serious journalist, which I'm pretty sure he'd admit he is not. I loved the pyramid, even when I didn't agree with some of it which wasn't a whole lot from what I remember. Anyone who is a big fan of the NBA and go into with not so serious a mindset, I think would really enjoy it.

the best ending I've ever read....

Very long and breezed thru the last half of the book, stopping on the players that interested me.

Very funny. A little crude and over-the-top at times (understatement) but still fun. Haven't laughed out loud reading like this since I read A Walk In The Woods. Just couldn't come to rate it as a favorite for fear I might be branded a pig. Was thinking of giving to my 13 year old nephew (before I read it), maybe I'll wait a couple of more years.

Tons of information, but I was put off by the juvenile/crude humor.

I'm a little over Bill Simmons these days; since he moved to LA he's completely lost touch with the Red Sox, and I don't care about any other sport. But this, published shortly after the Red Sox won their first World Series in (x) years, is the best literary celebration of that win.

If you don't know immediately and exactly what x is, you don't need to read this book.

A must read for any true NBA or Bill Simmons fan! Not only full of info but written as a fan with opinions. Will make you think about the best players and teams of history and even start arguments in your head about who was the better scorer, rebounder, etc. Overall a really fun read and I eagerly await the next installment in 2016!

The problem with publishing a daily literary website about sports, on a (I'm assuming) constrained budget is that it will be hard to produce daily content, let alone quality, daily content. Not every article is going to be an in-depth story on the finer points of the South Korean table tennis national team. Thus, we end up with columns like the Reality TV Fantasy League. Does the Grantland Quarterly really need an article about "Snooki's Wilt Chamberlain Performance?" No, it does not.

Thus reflects my disappointment with this issue of the Grantland Quarterly. There were some great articles ("The Art of Seat Poaching," "(Almost) Winning in Milwaukee," "The Fallacy of the Nets," and "Rise of the Blur Offense") but then there was some obvious filler (the aforementioned Snooki article and "The Hunks of College Football.") Not everything published on the website is going to be a winner and unfortunately the print edition suffers from some of the same pitfalls.

Fitting in the with theme of the difficulty in producing daily content, the issue fails to include any original material.* I don't manage to catch Grantland.com every day so there are plenty of articles in here the I failed to read on the website. But I'm sure there will be a few diehards out there who will be disappointed in the lack of at least a couple original pieces. Additionally, original pieces would help replace the filler because presumably the author would not be under a time crunch the same as if he or she were writing an article for the website. I did enjoy the snippets of conversations from the various Grantland podcast programs. I am glad to see those made it into Issue 3 as well.

Finally, since articles published on Grantland.com are so contemporaneous, by the time the Grantland Quarterly arrives in my mailbox I've already heard enough about the Penn State scandal and Tim Tebow to where I don't care to read four articles on these two subjects. But I understand that the Grantland Quarterly is supposed to be a collection of the best stories published on the website within the past few months. It's understandable that there will be some stories which feel like they have overstayed their welcome.

The presentation of the Grantland Quarterly is again wonderful. Issue 1 was a basketball and this time Issue 2 has a dust jacket that is a double sided poster with a reprint of the iconic Iceman poster on one side and... I'm not sure how to describe the other side. It's a visual depiction of Bill Simmons' and Jay Caspian Kang's dream renegade basketball league. In addition, there are color portraits in the front and colored illustrations throughout. The presentation alone always makes me excited to read the Quarterly.

Overall, this issue was a step back from the debut but I think fans of Grantland will still enjoy what Bill Simmons has presented.

*Editor's Note: I wrote this review with about 30 pages left in this issue and it appears that there is a short story included at the end that was not published on the website. My apologies.½

The first issue in the Grantland Quarterly series is a strong debut from Bill Simmons and Co. The issue features a selection of stories posted on the website as well as some new material. My favorite new pieces were "The Greatest Paper That Ever Died", about The National which was a short-lived daily sports newspaper, and "Statis Pro Baseball", about the baseball board game from the 1980s. I recommend this issue for sports fans looking for something more indepth beyond the daily box score and game recap.

"The only NBA player who routinely shut down {Larry} Bird was teammate Rick Robey, a backup center who doubled as Bird's drinking buddy and fellow troublemaker. When the Celtics swapped Robey for Dennis Johnson before the '84 season, Bird immediately rolled off the best five-year stretch in the history of the forward position. This wasn't a coincidence. As soon as we master time machine technology, let's travel back in time and frame Robey for murder right before the '82 season. I just want to see what happens."

The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy by Bill Simmons is fork in the path kind of book. If you are not a fan of men's professional basketball and the National Basketball Association, you won't be interested. If you are a fan, and since you're reading this, you probably are, then you'll want to read this book. He's funny, insightful, and the vast majority of the time, right on the money. Why did Bill Russell have so much success against Wilt Chamberlain? What is the Secret (capital S) to winning a championship? Why is Jordan the best player of all time? All the answers ring true. You can quibble with some of his conclusions - e.g. rating Isaiah Thomas above do-everything player Scottie Pippen - really?! But overall he knows his stuff like nobody else I've read, and he's a hoot at the same time.

As in the Bartimaeus books, a lot of the fun is in the absurd footnotes. After describing a Clippers player acquisition during the drug-addled 70s (when the NBA almost sunk) as being for "two first round picks, four kilos of cocaine, and {Denver's} best drug connection as compensation", the footnote to it says, "Be honest: part of you wanted to believe this." After leaving Isaiah Thomas off the all-time team headed up by Michael Jordan that would fight the aliens (you have to read it), he explains why, but also footnotes another reason why Isaiah couldn't be on the team: "Considering MJ hated him enough to keep him off the Dream Team, wouldn't he have said, 'Look, I'd rather see Earth blow up over being teammates with that guy?' I feel like the answer is yes."

There's 700 pages of this, so only NBA basketball wonks need apply. But if you fit that category, you'll have a blast with it.½

A wonderful, thorough compilation of the well researched thoughts and opinions of a serious fan. Simmons convinced me with his detailed analysis and amused me with (most of) his pop-culture references. He's got too big a crush on Michael Jordan, but otherwise his ideas are quite sound and engagingly presented.

i loved the book one of the best basketballl books i ever read i dont read alout of books well if i read a book its a sports book most of the time but i have actully read this big book

Being a big fan of both Bill Simmons and baseball I found this book delightful. I always enjoy his conversations with his father - they remind me so much of my son and I discussing our Arizona Wildcats and Diamondbacks. My only complaint about the book is the microscopic font used for the footnotes - I have old eyes but this was ridiculous and I gave up trying to read them about halfway through the book

extremely sexist. unfortunately fun to read.

A very funny book written by a die-hard Red Sox fan. He is very self-absorbed and doesn't respect women that much, but it is a very funny read.½

It's pretty easy to tell if you'll like this book. Read a random Simmons NBA piece on ESPN. Doesn't matter that much which one. Let's reach into the archives and say it's this one: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/060224 There you go. Dude's got a particular voice, which people either like or don't but are pretty polarized about, and this book is 700 pages of his enjoyment of the NBA, in that voice. I liked it. It's good to read in small pieces, when Simmons is writing columns on crap like "Jersey Shore" instead of the NBA. But I kinda wish I had read "Breaks of the Game" and "Loose Balls" instead. They sound like the parts of this I enjoyed the most, but more concentrated.

Excellent review of pro basketball, with paricular attention paid to the period after the ABA/NBA merger. While Simmons is a bit of a Celtic homer -- shown even though he sometimes goes completely out of his way to disprove it -- he does an incredibly thorough job of defending all of his picks for greatest players and teams.
The book's two great failings: A. The ranking of Kobe (however timing probably had more to do with that than anything else) and B. The lack of respect/glitter/understanding given to the Lakers. While I do not like the Lakers (at all), you would never know that they have the equal number of World Championships than the Celtics.
Overall, good read.½

If you like the NBA and know the players, this is an interesting read. If you don't - there is no way you're getting through this book½