Bill Simmons' NBA Season Review: Time for Change

[Andrew]

Part one of two here.

As always, another good read from the Sports Guy. He goes off the rails a bit with his proposals for changing the regular season and Playoffs format. The Entertaining As Hell Tournament would probably be entertaining as hell, but in all reality it'd probably be as much dicking around as the current system which doesn't fit with his other suggestions. Again, a good read though.

[benji]

Lousy read, it's the same stupid article he's written about five times in the last six months. He should try writing about basketball again instead of jerking off over his ability to use whatever calender app is driving his fetish. (He's done similar things with the MLB, NFL and college sports schedules too.)

Grantland's new design stinks as well. (Which puts it more in line with the content, so there's that.)

[The X]

He needs to give up his idea of EAH tourney. If he wants to stop tanking, why not alter lottery so each non-playoff team has a 1/14th chance of winning top pick.

Rather than rewarding worst teams with chance to win a title, thereby rendering whole season as useless, why not just tinker with who can qualify for playoffs. You could have top two teams from each division qualifying (top team in each division gets home court & next best record also does) & then have two wildcards to round out the eight. Doing this might add a little more value to inter-division games.

Or you could have only 6 teams qualify from each conference (top team from each division gets home court then 3 wildcards). Then team 3 plays team 6 in round 1 & team 4 plays team 5 in round 1 in a best of five series. Top two teams from each conference get some rest then rest of playoffs is best of 7.

I do agree with him on slightly later start to season & less games played.

[Andrew]

That's the problem with Bill Simmons sometimes. I like his columns, I enjoyed The Book of Basketball, but in the middle of making some good points he'll throw out something like "Step Two: Play games on the moon". Not that it isn't entertaining and it's obviously done to be a bit different and spice up his writing, but sometimes it feels out of place.

[benji]

In this case it's him just rehashing that tournament idea he's had for years to fill space because he's writing another book and yet almost nobody wants to read anything on Grantland but him.

Simmons once had a "stream of consciousness" style of writing that allowed him to make all his generally boring and ignorant points about sports within an expansive referential context that led to 2500 word tomes that occasionally hit on salient thoughts and were well written in a specific voice. The fact that the Book of Basketball is 900+ pages but doesn't really contain all that many innovative arguments is a testament to this, along with Deadspin's unearthed columns about how fuckable tennis players are.

But now there's Grantland. He's compressed, when not ditching out (as he has on the mailbags, his "weekly" NBA column and then the 12 days of the NBA which only got saved due to the Chris Paul stuff) on the concept, and is mostly rehashing over his material of the last few years. And he's entirely lost his voice to where it's blatantly forced at times and you can tell he's not buying it but going through the motions.

Part one of his "season review" contains exactly one paragraph on the season to date. We'll see on part two, if he doesn't give up like the 12 days, or his annual trade value deal.

Can we really blame him? He got kicked off the failed Page 2 to start a spin-off that's the same exact thing (before ESPN fucked up Page 2...remember Page 3!) that he wasn't allowed to pick the name for and has been taken out of his hands more than even his Page 2 columns were.

[The X]

I'll be the first to admit that I enjoyed reading The Book of Basketball. I borrowed off Sit and was solid reading during my 30 minute train trip to work. A book that covers the history of the league is fine by me.

I agree that it has gone downhill since going to Grantland (what kind of shite name.is that?). I use to enjoy. is running draft diaries. Also don't mind trade value column. Funnily enough his best column actually centred.around his now deceased dog and had nothing to do with bball.

[benji]

The Book of Basketball isn't a bad book, Simmons isn't any worse than the rest of the sportswriters in writing books with bad arguments and he's extensive which is great. I even like Elliot Kalb's "Who's Better, Who's Best" quite a bit simply because of its treatment of history and interviews with players/coaches/etc. even though the arguments in it are simply horrendous. (Only "Mr. Stats" has to start off his book by ranking players using Frank Sinatra...)

I've read more bad basketball books than I can count, there's only a few GOOD history only books out there. Even most of the contemporary ones are either written by people involved (most any Lakers book) or abject homers (most Bulls books) or Knicks fans. It's been probably a decade since I read it but I feel like The Franchise was one of the more even handed takes on a title team. (Compared to most which are just worshiping on how everything was brilliant and preordained by destiny.) Show Time by RIley and Last Season by Jackson were pretty candid but both guys were "retired for good" so that helped. Even Basketball on Paper isn't well-written. Terry Pluto's good.

Paul Shirley's book is actually one of the best basketball books out there in my opinion.

Grantland's named after http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantland_Rice Simmons apparently refuses to talk about how the name was chosen.

[The X]

I'll have to give Paul Shirley's book a look at some point. I liked his column and self deprecating sense of humour.

Since you've read a lot of bball books, what would rank on you top 5? I'm not talking history, just bball in general whether NBA or not.

[benji]

Oh god, that's almost impossible for me. I'm sure you already know but I just consume info like mad.

But just to take a few books I can think of for enjoyment and not counting Shirley's (which is truly great, I think Jae read it maybe he can chime in) and probably not even top five but some I can think of immediately that I liked:
-The Franchise; on the Pistons building to a title and the expansion draft aftermath, I liked how it dealt with the Dantley/Aguirre stuff along with how the expansion draft and the lesser players became important in their own right.
-The Last Amateurs; the one Feinstein book I actually really liked because it wasn't really important. A Season on the Brink, etc. "matter more" but the only person you'll recognize in this is Adonal Foyle. It's got that "LOOK HOW PURE" aspect, but I liked it despite that.
-When Nothing Else Matters; this is clearly set out to be a sort of grand tale of Jordan's last effort, similar to how The Franchise starts as writing about the destiny of the Pistons, but in the end it's unintentionally critical about Jordan's mad drive to force the Wizards into contention by his own sheer will. And how that doesn't work and leaves him cast off from a franchise he part-owns. It might be the one Jordan book that paints him as a sympathetic figure. (EDIT: This is $2 on Amazon right now, I think I need to order it.)
-The Show; Not an amazing book by any means since it covers all of Lakers history, but I liked that it spent time on all the eras and got into all the controversies. It's clearly a Lakers hagiography but I thought it was solidly fair.

Stalling on thinking of others currently so I'll just say The Last Season and Basketball on Paper.

(EDIT: I actually liked Moneyball less for the stats crap than for the discussion of Beane's thought and management process. But Michael Lewis is just a great writer, thus why the No-Stats All-Star article and The Big Short are also great works.)

[Fresh8]

Speaking of books, looking forward to Jax's 2013 release: Eleven Rings

[Andrew]

Part two...which is also another part one.