The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy Author: Bill Simmons | Language: English | ISBN:
B002MUAFWY | Format: EPUB
The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy Description
Foreword by Malcolm Gladwell
Newly updated with fresh takes on LeBron, Kobe, the Celtics & more*
*Including even more footnotes!
Bill Simmons, the wildly opinionated and thoroughly entertaining hoops addict known to millions as ESPN.com’s Sports Guy, has written the definitive book on the past, present, and future of the NBA. From the age-old question of who actually won the rivalry between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain to the one about which team was truly the best of all time, Simmons opens—and then closes, once and for all—every major pro basketball debate. Then he takes it further by completely reevaluating not only how NBA Hall of Fame inductees should be chosen but how the institution must be reshaped from the ground up, the result being the Pyramid: Simmons’s one-of-a-kind five-level shrine to the ninety-six greatest players in the history of pro basketball. And ultimately he takes fans to the heart of it all, as he uses a conversation with one NBA great to uncover that coveted thing: The Secret of Basketball.
Comprehensive, authoritative, controversial, hilarious, and impossible to put down (even for Celtic-haters), The Book of Basketball offers every hardwood fan a courtside seat beside the game’s finest, funniest, and fiercest chronicler.
- File Size: 2683 KB
- Print Length: 754 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0345520106
- Publisher: ESPN; Upd Rep edition (October 27, 2009)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B002MUAFWY
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,277 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #2
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Basketball - #6
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Miscellaneous > History of Sports - #13
in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Basketball
- #2
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Basketball - #6
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Miscellaneous > History of Sports - #13
in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Basketball
(10/28) Still working my way through it, but here are my impressions so far:
(1) Buy the dead tree version even if you have a Kindle. Simmons buries an absurd amount of information in the footnotes, a lot more than just citations. They're set up as endnotes at the end of each chapter, which is awkward for Kindle users. The footnotes are almost like one of those extra audio tracks in a DVD where the director provides running commentary on a film; for better or worse, you're missing out on a lot if you skip the footnotes. Why he thought this was a good way to write a book is beyond me. But you're going to want to read the footnotes.
(2) if you bet "under 1.5" as the first chapter in which an NBA moment is compared to a scene in Shawshank Redemption, you covered.
(3) if this book had an MPAA rating, it would be rated R. He says things that he could never get away with in his ESPN columns. For example, he refers to going off birth control as "pulling the goalie" and calls the Hawks' selection of Marvin Williams in the 2005 draft (instead of Chris Paul or Deron Williams) "an Aretha Franklin sized mistake."
(4) I've probably read half a dozen different "Wilt or Russell?" articles over the years, and Simmons' handling of the debate is probably the best one.
Will update in coming days.
Update (11/3): Man Reads Entire Book of Basketball -- And Lives!
If the Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is the '86 Celtics of sports history books -- a timeless classic that could succeed in any era -- then TBOB is the '79 Sonics: a championship team but not one that will be remembered forever, and one that could probably only have won a championship in its own time. Why does TBOB fall short of the absolute pinnacle?
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