Reprinted from my website Secure Immaturity:The Sports Guy (aka Bill Simmons) is an engaging, Internet personality. He previously wrote a book that was a collection of his highly successful and entertaining Internet postings regarding his beloved Red Sox. Any fan of Simmons knows that he is a rabid Boston sports fanatic, most notably the Celtics and Red Sox. If there is any weakness to his writing it is that he is insanely biased to those Boston teams. When approaching topics from a fan perspect [...]

Ultimately, a pretty disappointing book. As a big fan of the Sports Guy's columns about the NBA, I thought I would be laughing from beginning to end and learning a lot. Neither turned out to be true. By expanding upon the worst parts of his columns - his obsessive biases towards certain types of players and teams - and mostly ignoring the profound insight he usually incites with his biting humor, Simmons comes off as someone who spent too much time watching pro basketball and now can do nothing [...]

If you're a huge NBA fan, a guy, are between the ages 40 and 48 (as of 2012) and have watched an insane amount of TV and movies this is a no-brainier 5 star book(1). Otherwise I don't think you'll like it.I haven't enjoyed a book this much in a very long time. Malcom Gladwell nails it in the forward here he says Bill Simmons is what you would be if you had endless hours to devote to being a fan. Bill Simmons is hilarious + his love of the NBA and his ability to create analogies from random stuff [...]

When Chuck Klosterman and, of all intellectual giants, Bill Walton can destroy the theoretical foundation of your 700-page book's analysis in ten pages worth of cameoswell, it's probably asking too much for you to admit that you wasted the last two years of your life and start over from scratch, but that's probably what you should do. The Book of Basketball works alright as entertainment, though the expanded license for dick jokes fails to enhance Simmons' humor much, but as a work of analysis, [...]

It's incredibly entertaining at best, infuriating and a drunken digression at others. Simmons views himself as an expert, and that comes through on every page - whether in his decision that John Stockton played in era of "inflated assists" or his condemnation of the last twenty minutes of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. He's just not that smart, frankly. In both cases, he makes specious claims and then moves on to more specious claims or backs them up with statistics that are supposed to be taken at fac [...]

Here's the problem with being a huge fan of a prolific columnist: When you've read every single word a guy has squeaked out for 7-plus years, you start to know all his (or her, I suppose) jokes, all their beats and all their tendencies. You lose the element of surprise.So when it was announced that The Sports Guys new basketball book was more than 700 pages, I cringed. Not sure if I could take that many pages of Karate Kid jokes and Celtics handjobs. My infatuation with the guy has died wuite a [...]

I have to confess that finishing this book felt like something of a chore. At 700 pages, you really have to love basketball, or Bill Simmons - or both - to get through it. I like basketball a lot, but I can't pretend to have followed it very closely, historically. The Book of Baseball would have been an easier read for me, because I already know more about the main characters. I started this months ago and plugged away, plugged away, finally devoting the better part of a weekend to finishing it. [...]

Thoughts (Simmons style):Simmons must have hired John Iriving's editor to edit this book and that's not a complement. What was the point of the Grumpy Old Editor? To not edit? I think this is the world longest coffee table book.The Most Valuable Chapter? Why was this in the book? This was excruciating to read Over all, it's hard to disagree with where Simmons ranked everyone. The only WTF ranking I saw was Garnett over Isiah and Pippen. But everything else is nitpicking.I'm not sure I needed a f [...]

This highly entertaining book is many things: a fan's love letter to his favorite sport (and the players and teams who made it so), an attempt to place professional basketball in the cultural (and racial) landscape of twentieth century America, and an attempt to settle arguments about what matters on the basketball court.Bill Simmons is successful on the first two counts, but is tenuous on the third. The first is the emotion of the fan's experience; there are passages that sent shivers down my s [...]

The Sports Guy is known for his willingness to authoritatively state his opinions in an entertaining manner featuring his parenthetical prowess, command of pop cultural metaphor, crazed zeal for his subject matter, seemingly endless encyclopedic dissertation of facts, and personal connection to the material and the reader. His 700-page tome features all of these Simmons standby techniques, as well as his signature voice, punctuated by his overactive love of footnotes and casually vulgar interjec [...]

7,5 μήνες, 750 σελίδες και πάλι καλά τα πήγα. Το ατελείωτο βιβλίο του Simmons για το ΝΒΑ είχε αναγνωστικά την ίδια λειτουργία που είχε κι η συλλογή με τα κείμενα του Lester Bangs. Ένα τακτικό διάλειμμα για τις ώρες που η λογοτεχνία δεν μου έκανε ή για τα συχνά διαστήματα που ο χρόνος μου δ� [...]

This book was very fun to read. It was full of everything from basketball to movies, and it wasn't just another boring informational. It reads very well, and even if you don't read all of it order, each section could be a miniature book. Along with entertaining you throughout, Bill Simmons puts a lot of thought into his writing. He takes everything from the Hall of Fame to An All time All-NBA team. Even if you are an NBA fan yourself, and don't agree with his choices at first, he explains them i [...]

a lot of great basketball history almost ruined by two things: 1) a sometimes sickening love for the boston celtics and 2) finding david fosters wallace's style in a book about basketball (replete, with made-up proper noun titles, exuberant friendly narrative voice and a scholarly knowledge mixed with bawdy asides and metaphors, oh - and the dead giveaway - footnotes (not that dfw has a total claim to footnotes, but simmons uses them in almost the exact same way) but other than these two things, [...]

So I read this book during the basketball lockout to keep me company. And I finished just as the strike ended. I didn't buy this book as a hardcover even though I know a lot of people who raved about it. But when I flipped through it in the store, I just couldn't get myself to pay for it because the writer is such a die hard Celtics fan.When it came out in paperback, and was updated to incorporate the Lakers winning the championship (yeah, you guessed it, I'm a Lakers fan) I saw that the writer [...]

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 [...]

I'm so grateful a book like this exists about basketball. It's the basketball bible. Any hardcore basketball fan should read this ASAP. It's an in depth view of the history of the league and contains fun lists and comparisons to different eras and teams and players. It's just a lot of fun to read. I'll admit, for being five stars, the book isn't incredibly written, but Simmons makes up for it with humor and pop culture references. He throws in about 1000 Boogie Nights references, which is one of [...]

Disclosure: I regularly listen to Bill Simmons B.S. Report podcasts and I usually read his columns on espn thus I'm a fan of his work.That being said, I was somewhat disappointed with TBOB. Overall it was very insightful, but parts of it were a little tiresome. I found myself skimming certain portions - especially if they dealt with players that played in the NBA during the 50s and 60s. Other than a few interesting tidbits about the history of the NBA (evolution of the shot clock, 3-point shoote [...]

I am a fan of Bill Simmons' columns and podcasts. I also read his earlier book on the Boston Redsox. Compared to his other work, this book was just a grind. I didn't read it so much as cross it off my todo list. At 700 pages, it is long, but I actually didn't notice myself watching the page number too much. It was more that the different rankings and lists just seem to go on forever. I also don't think the book turned out this way due to a lack of effort on Simmons' part. It just seems to not be [...]

Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of Simmons. Sure he's not the "best" sportswriter (my personal favorite is ESPN's Phil Ball, who covers the Spanish soccer league, La Liga) but it is easy to chuckle while reading his columns and appreciate how he weaves pop culture into his columns. His new fabulous Grantland website is also something that should be applauded.While I enjoyed parts of this book, the problems I see with it are as follows: 1) length (750 pages) 2) parts of it merely rehash many o [...]

I enjoyed this book, but man a livin' - there aren't many books where you can say the author probably should have cut out 500 pages Bill Simmons has an incredible knowledge of the NBA (current and historical), much of which is first hand knowledge (having grown up with Celtics season tickets), but even with his internet articles I've always thought he talks too long. I really enjoyed the anecdotes (which he draws from his own life, but also from all of the NBA books and interview he has read), a [...]

This Book was actually pretty good, I thought this book would have mostly statistics on the latest player and the famous players. This book teaches you how to play basketball and how it works. Bill Simmons shared some "basketball secrets" that most people or players don't even know. Most people think you just have the skills to play basketball since you were a kid or you just can't play at all. But one of Bill Simmons favorite quote is, "But that's the thing of Basketball: You don't play games o [...]

In the interest of complete disclosure, I have to say that I am one of the biggest fans of the NBA that you will find. I have been since about 1980 and I have a lot of useless basketball trivia floating around in my head. That said, I have nothing on Bill Simmons (though I would love to chat with him about it some day). If you are a casual fan of the sport, this book is probably not for you except maybe for use as a sports reference book or some great bathroom fodder. It reads sort of like an En [...]

I love basketball and am fan of the NBA (there are a few of us out there), but my knowledge of pro basketball pre-1992 was limited, so I appreciate the book as a resource that is fun to read, well argued, and well researched. Freed from ESPN's censors, however, Bill Simmons' humor unfortunately resorted to one to many dick and tit jokes. Though in his articles he makes subtle (and at times not so subtle) remarks about how he is limited by corporate censorship, it turns out that extra work he had [...]

I think this book was pretty good. I like basketball and sports, and Bill Simmons is a good sports writer, having his own sports website. The book starts off about him as a young Celtics fan. Each section is kind of like a book. It includes a debate about who's better: Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain, and a chapter about what ifs. A big part of the book was the top basketball players of all time. It just has tons of Basketball. I liked this book, and the only downside to me is that the top play [...]

Entertaining, but it's 700 pages of opinion masquerading as fact. The fact that he bails out on the history of the league when he reaches the mid-80s is a big problem. So is daring to compare his book to Bill James'. This was fun, but it won't age well.

Reading this book is like arguing across the Thanksgiving table with your masshole uncle. Simmons has a truly encyclopedic knowledge of pro players, and advances one conceit about teamwork (dubbed The Secret by Simmons and later The Choice by NBA great Bill Walton [the fact that the actual athlete is more poetic tells you all you need to know]) which is called on throughout this collosal text. TBB's most troubling feature is its handling of race. Black and White American dynamics are tied to the [...]

As a Bostonian, I've long been an apologist fan of Bill Simmons. His writing style is unique and much more conversational than most sportswriters, and whether he'll admit it or not, he really was the first sports blogger to be accepted by the mainstream. In small doses, such as a weekly or column on ESPN, he's a breath of fresh air. Over the course of 700 pages on the other handlet's just say a little Simmons goes a long way.The book isn't without merit, or charm. Simmons claims to have done ext [...]

I mostly picked this up to try to learn about great NBA players of the past and what made them so great. I am a huge Golden State Warriors fan and am well-versed on the NBA teams and players of today, but don't know a whole lot of specifics about those who came before I was born and before I got interested in watching basketball.I enjoyed Simmons' sense of humor immensely. Every so often he would elaborate on something he thought was funny that was actually irrelevant and annoying (that huge "Te [...]

I read Bill Simmons’s The Book of Basketball. I enjoyed his book, as it is a fun survey of NBA history. The book isn’t just a numbers game or just breaking down plays. It includes enough human interest elements that it should appeal to a casual fan or diffident parties (like me; I can count the number of basketball games I’ve seen – TV or live – on both hands.) Simmons does a fantastic job of conveying his love of basketball. For me, he really brought different basketball eras to life, [...]

For better and for worse, this book has a lot of basketball and a lot of Simmons.I have long enjoyed Bill Simmons' columns, primarily because of his ability to engage in detailed and insightful analysis of sports while writing in an entertaining style. I prefer this style to the dry, technical style of most detailed sports writing. The Book of Basketball is written in that style and allows you to enjoy highly detailed analysis of players and teams from many different eras. Simmons' knowledge of [...]