Bill Simmons - The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy

PRAISE FOR
THE BOOK OF BASKETBALL

Simmons crazed genius and uncommon attention to the NBA stand out. This is the ultimate book for the connoisseur of sports minutiae, an exhaustively curated NBA guide.

Slate

Research has given Simmons an unusually keen eye for the game, which he uses to try to resolve some of basketballs thorniest debates. He can flat out write.

The New York Times Book Review

Ambitious, definitive The opinionated Simmons will be entertaining to all NBA junkies.

The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)

Damn enjoyable Simmons is a smart aleck, but hes also doggedly thorough with his facts and writes with authority.

BookPage

Captures the visceral joy of a true fan Simmons pulls it off with a mesmerizing mix of statistics, wild pop-culture riffs, and tons of humor.

ScrippsNews

A must-read for any NBA fan.

The Denver Post

Guaranteed to make you laugh out loud.

USA Today

Hilarious.

The Oregonian

Engaging a great read for sports fans.

SmartMoney

[An] incredible epic masterfully written and thought-provoking.

Cleveland

One of the best things Ive read about sports detailed with love and a passion for the game.

The Florida Times-Union

Packed with knowledgeable and historical insights and full of statistics and hilarious footnotes (two words I thought Id never see together), this book will entertain an NBA fan for weeks.

M YLES K NAPP , The Sacramento Bee

ALSO BY BILL SIMMONS

Now I Can Die in Peace:
How the Sports Guy Found Salvation Thanks to the World Champion (Twice!) Red Sox

A 2010 Ballantine Books and ESPN Books Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright 2009 by Bill Simmons

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by ESPN Books, an imprint of ESPN, Inc., New York, and Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B ALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. The ESPN Books name and logo are registered trademarks of ESPN, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint an excerpt from The Franchise by Cameron Stauth. Copyright 1990 by Cameron Stauth. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simmons, Bill.
The book of basketball : the NBA according to the sports guy / Bill Simmons.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-51311-3
1. Basketball. 2. National Basketball Association. I. Title.
GV885.1.S46 2009
796.323.640973dc22 2009036006

www.ballantinebooks.com
www.espnbooks.com

v3.1

For my father and for my son.
I hope I can be half as good of a dad.

INTRODUCTION

You might be standing in a bookstore right now. You might be leaning against a sofa in someones house. You might be sitting on the john. You might be taking a bath. You might be shopping at one of those dollar stores, sitting on a beach, riding in a car, reading a free e-book preview. You might be sitting in a library or a Starbucks and wondering if the guy two chairs away is surfing porn on his iPad. You might be planning on clubbing someone to death with this thingand really, you probably couldand wanted to read the first few pages before you did the deed. Regardless, you are thinking one of the following four things.

) allows you to follow up on any magazine articles, games, plays, YouTube clips or anecdotes mentioned in the paperback with one exception: Greg Odens dong.

Until the bitter end, I resisted my publishers demands for a finished edit. They wanted it after the 2010 Finals; I wanted to wait until LeBron made his decision. Every instinct I had told me, Something weird is going to happen. Something did. Thats the thing about the book of basketballit never stops rewriting itself. After LeBron picked Miami, I realized this book will never be finished. For my own sanity, I needed to stop working on it. Five years was enough. There will never be another version. I promise. You have my word.

Bill Simmons
September 1, 2010

When I told Gladwell that I had spent eight weeks on my paperback, he laughed and said, Are you kidding? Nobody does extra work for a paperback! Yeah, but still.

Well, until 2015. Or unless some crazy NBA-related shit happens and I have to rewrite it again. Or unless I go broke. Actually, forget I promised anything.

FOREWORD
Malcolm Gladwell

Not long ago, Bill Simmons decided to lobby for the job of general manager of the Minnesota Timberwolves. If you are a regular reader of Bills, you will know this, because he would make references to his campaign from time to time in his column. But if you are a regular reader of Bills column, you also know enough to be a little unsure about what to make of his putative candidacy. Bill, after all, has a very active sense of humor. He likes messing with people, the way he used to mess with Isiah Thomas, back when Thomas was suffering from a rare psychiatric disorder that made him confuse Eddy Curry with Bill Russell. Even after I learned that the Minnesota front office had received something like twelve thousand emails from fans arguing for the Sports Guy, my position was that this was a very elaborate joke. Look, I know Bill. He lives in Los Angeles. When he landed there from Boston, he got down on his hands and knees and kissed the tarmac. Hes not leaving the sunshine for the Minnesota winter. Plus, Bill is a journalist, right? Hes a fan. He only knows what you know from watching games on TV. But then I read this quite remarkable book that you have in your hands, and I realized how utterly wrong I was. Simmons knows basketball. Hes serious. And the T-wolves should be, too.

What is Bill Simmons like? This is not an irrelevant question, because it explains a lot about why The Book of Basketball is the way it is. The short answer is that Bill is exactly like you or me. Hes a fanan obsessive fan, in the best sense of the word. I have a friend whose son grew up with the Yankees in their heyday and just assumed that every fall would bring another World Series ring. But then Rivera blew that save, and the kid was devastated. He cried. He didnt talk for days. The world as he knew it had collapsed. Now thats a