Bill Simmons
Known simply as “The Sports Guy,” Bill Simmons is a popular columnist for ESPN.com’s Page 2 website and host of the B.S. Report podcast, but the nickname only describes the most prominent of his obsessions. As conversant in the intricacies of Mad Men and The Real World as he is with the weekly NFL betting lines or the epic Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, Simmons is rare among sports writers for his playful integration of well-reasoned, provocative opinion and pop-culture references. Though he currently resides in Los Angeles, his passion for all things Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox-related would make his allegiances to his native Boston clear, even if his accent didn’t give it away. As season-ticket holders, he and his father witnessed the Celtics’ ’80s dynasty firsthand, and that experience informs the prologue to The Book Of Basketball, Simmons’ mammoth, 736-page opus on his favorite game. From a thorough deflating of Wilt Chamberlain’s legacy to a hilarious (and spot-on) likening of Kobe Bryant to Teen Wolf, Simmons offers a personal history of the sport that measures great players and teams against each other and breaks down statistics, usually by asserting that stats mean squat. In the middle of a punishing book tour, Simmons took an hour to talk to The A.V. Club about the rancid state of sports talk radio, the current NBA referee scandal, why Bill Russell is a better basketball player than Chamberlain, and his role in co-producing the stellar ESPN documentary series 30 For 30.
The A.V. Club: On a recent B.S. Report with Chuck Klosterman, you talked about the writing process, and how you weren’t the sort to have a book outlined in advance. So where did you start with The Book Of Basketball? And where did the process take you that you might not have anticipated?
Bill Simmons: I started with the prologue. In the summer of 2007, I wrote the prologue and the Russell/Chamberlain chapter [which compares the legacies of Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, and concludes the former was the better player, stats be damned— ed.], and I wrote some other things, but they were just kind of pieces. I didn’t know where I was going, but I trusted the process. It was not the way to do a book, I can tell you that much. I knew I wanted to do the Hall Of Fame pyramid. [The book includes a ranking of the 50 greatest players in order. —ed.] And I knew I wanted to do a greatest-teams chapter. But I really didn’t know how I was going to tie everything together. And initially, I thought it was going to be a little bit more about how to put a team together, and I just went away from that and concentrated more on the history and evaluating, and whether there was a common theme. Then the more I got into the history, it just kind of kept going. There’s so many things I didn’t know, and there was just so little out there. The number of informative basketball books, where you could learn, “All right, why did this happen?”, is very little. And that’s when I knew I was on to something. I didn’t really know if the book was going to work, though, until I wrote about [Hall Of Fame Los Angeles Lakers forward and former Los Angeles Clippers GM] Elgin Baylor for the website in 2008, when he got fired right before the 2008-2009 season. It was one of those columns that I wrote just because I liked Elgin Baylor, not because I thought a lot of people were going to read it. And it was really popular. I got a ton of e-mails from people who were like, “I had no idea…” That’s how uninformed people were. They had just always thought of him as the guy with the bad sweaters during the draft lottery, you know? [Laughs.] And that’s when I knew the book would work, because people were so flabbergasted that this guy was an unbelievable basketball player, and it just seemed things like that were going to work in my favor.
AVC: So you think this ended up being more a book of history than simply a book of opinion?
BS: Oh, I think it’s a blend. It’s more opinion than history, but I think if you don’t know a lot about the NBA, or if you’re a big NBA fan but you don’t know a lot of stuff that happened before you started following, and you don’t know how these guys tie together, or you don’t really understand stuff like these numbers and records that have lived on, that in a lot of cases weren’t as impressive as they seem… Like I always say, Oscar [Robertson]’s triple-double is a good example of that. [Robertson averaged double digits in points, rebounds, and assists per game in the 1961-1962 season, the only NBA player to accomplish that.] It’s not that great of a record, and it’s always brought up.
AVC: [Sarcastically.] Well, you’re obviously really impressed by Wilt never fouling out.
BS: Yeah, the not-fouling-out streak is impressive in a different way. That’s the thing: As I dived into it, there were so many dumb things I found out that actually weren’t dumb—they were kind of fascinating. And they said a hell of a lot about just how weird the league was. Something like Moses [Malone], and how he belonged to four teams in three months. He’s one of the 12 greatest players ever! It was this league that just… not only did the league always seem to make the wrong move, but most of the teams did, too. That was the case for 40 solid years, just this league that kept fucking up and teams that kept fucking up.
AVC: Did current NBA commissioner David Stern make the difference? What was the turning point?
BS: It was more a turning point of perception, which is what I try to lay out in the book. There’s this fairy tale now that [Larry] Bird and Magic [Johnson] rode in on their white horses and saved the league, and it definitely helped, but I don’t think that was really the case. In their first year, almost half the conference finals games were tape-delayed. I think a much bigger issue was cable TV, and the fact that more and more games were being shown on cable, and people could actually see the teams. There was one season where they only showed four regular-season games. So it’s like, “How is a league going to catch on when four regular season games are on TV?” And that really helped. Also, SportsCenter really helped, just being able to see highlights of games—all of a sudden now you’re seeing the best pieces of games, and you’re seeing the best dunk in a game, and I think that kind of swayed people a little bit. And the ad campaigns that started running in 1982, where they started doing the NBA’s “It’s fantastic!” commercials. They started to get it. And I think Stern was definitely responsible for a lot of it. It’s always unclear how much, though, you know? The previous commissioner [Larry O’Brien] green-lighted All-Star Weekend, which was a huge thing for the league, but basically, they had to bat him over the head to commit to it. He wanted to make sure the whole thing was paid for. He had no vision at all. And I think that guy caused a lot of issues for the league. And then there were drugs, obviously, and the league was too black, and that was a big theme back then. “Can the league be this successful with this many black guys?” It’s hard to believe now anybody would say that, but back then, people actually talked that way.
AVC: One of the book’s major points is that basketball can’t be quantified in the same way that, say, baseball could. Intangibles matter perhaps more than statistics. Could you expand on that idea? And how strange was it to have Isiah Thomas, GM of the New York Knicks, talk to you about this?
BS: One of my favorite things about basketball is that you can’t break it down into some sort of science that makes total sense. And that’s why this current statistical revolution really bugs me. I think we’re figuring out ways now to use stats to try to isolate what players do, but you’re never going to be able to rate players against one another, because out of all the sports, basketball is the one that depends the most on the relationship somebody has with his teammates. And if you judged stuff by stats, you would think Wilt was better than Russell, and you’d make a kajillion mistakes that if you were making those same types of things in baseball, you probably would be right. Baseball is an individual sport that we can measure almost to a fault. In my opinion, it’s not even that fun to follow baseball anymore, because you’re not allowed to have any opinions. You have to look up every opinion you’re supposed to have. “Oh, is A-Rod clutch? Let me look that up. Yes, he’s hitting .356 in the clutch. So I guess that means he’s clutch.” What’s fun about it? It’s like algebra. And in basketball, I think so much of it depends on intuition and understanding the game, and understanding that just because somebody scored 43 points in a game doesn’t necessarily mean he had a good game. How guys affect their teammates is more important. For instance, it really would have bothered me if somebody 35 years from now thought [eight-time all-star forward] Vince Carter was a totally worthwhile player. Those are the kind of things that drive me crazy. I wanted to design a book that I could keep updating, and that maybe eight years from now I’d come out with a second edition, and the pyramid would look different. But the basic themes would be the same, because I don’t think it ever changes.
AVC: What do you think of plus-minus, the stat that registers how well a team does when a certain player is in the game? That seems to be the closest that anyone’s come up with to measuring those intangibles.
BS: The plus-minus lineups are intriguing. When these five guys play together, say, the team does this. But I just think it’s a really flawed stat. You know, for instance, let’s say I’m Derrick Rose’s backup point guard for the [Chicago] Bulls. So every time Derrick Rose goes out, I come in. How is that going to affect his plus-minus? Obviously, every time I come in, we’re going to get crushed. So he’s going to look fantastic. And if I’m on the 2008 [Boston] Celtics, and I’m Kendrick Perkins, and I’m playing with three all-stars and [guard] Rajon Rondo, my plus-minus is going to look fantastic every time I’m in the game. I don’t know, the stuff I’ve read about it, some of the results are so stupid. I think if you have results that say Darius Songaila is totally underrated, then that’s it. Just throw your formula out, that’s stupid. If your research reveals that Tim Thomas is a totally underrated statistical player, then throw it out. Start over. Press the reset button.
AVC: What did you think of Michael Lewis’ piece on Shane Battier? [Lewis, the author of Moneyball, posited Battier as a prime example of a statistically terrible player who’s very valuable to a team. —ed.] Lewis seems like the last person who would be writing about a player whose virtues don’t show up in a stat sheet, but it would seem to support your point.
BS: Yeah. He came to a lot of the same conclusions that I would come up with, but did it in a slightly different way, and looked at the process of statistically evaluating somebody like him. And, you know, I think there are ways to do it. You can say, “All right, this guy, every time he shoots a three, he makes 40 percent of them.” Well, that’s good. “He doesn’t turn the ball over a lot.” That’s good. “When he guards, the guys on the opposing teams that he guards, their field goal percentage drops this much.” That’s good. But ultimately, you know, you still have to watch the games. You can’t just crunch data and spit it out. What’s interesting about Battier is that the Houston GM [Daryl Morey], who I’m friends with, they have all the stats that say Battier actually is good, and he’s efficient. But when they had those player-rater type stats, he comes off horribly. Out of 340 players, he was something like the 280th best player. Which, by the way, should tell you how dumb player-rater stats are. But as I said earlier, I think the revolution that’s happening with the GMs is that they’re figuring out how to chart specific things that happen in a game, and how to use them to their advantage. A great example is charting corner threes. So, all right, what is everybody’s field goal percentage when they’re shooting a wide-open corner three? And the reason that you chart that is you might have an offense where the guy in the corner is always open. And you might have somebody like LeBron James, and you’re like, “All right, I want to have a guy in the corner who I know is going to make an open three.” So you crunch all the stats and say, “Oh, look, did you know that this guy actually secretly is 25 for 52?” And I think that’s when they can get really useful. But once you start talking about that absolutely ridiculous Wages Of Wins stat, whatever the fuck that was…
AVC: What was that?
BS: That was a book [written by economists David J. Berri, Martin B. Schmidt, and Stacey L. Brook] that came out a few years ago, and it was saying that during Allen Iverson’s MVP year, he was the 100th best player, or whatever… It was typical. You’re going to have a stat that says Allen Iverson was the 91st best player of that season, or whatever the hell it was? Just press the reset button.
AVC: Couldn’t you look at him the same way as Vince Carter and say, “This guy doesn’t have any championships. Teams don’t necessarily cohere around him,” et cetera?
BS: Well, the difference is, there’s been a lot of great scorers that could never take their team to the finals, a lot of great offensive players who took a lot of shots, and Iverson was the only one out of anybody in that group that actually made the finals. Like George Gervin, Tracy McGrady, Vince Carter, guys like that. He had… I forget what I called it in the book, but a “fuck-you intensity,” where there’s something about him that in the last four minutes of a game, his teammates felt like he was going to come through. He got better, he got more… I don’t know what the crunch-time, clutch stats were or whatever, but he thought they were going to win. And when you watch… I watched a lot of DVDs and tapes in preparing for the book, and somebody like George Gervin would just disappear in the last four minutes if you started muscling him around. Iverson really thought he was going to win, and that he always thought he was the best guy on the court. And that’s something that, you know, how do you measure that with a stat? How do you measure that out of the 10 guys on the court in a close game, there’s one guy who thinks that he’s the best guy, and everybody else kind of thinks so, too? You can’t measure that.
AVC: He seemed to me the only guy who brought it on the bronze-medal-winning 2004 Olympics team. He seemed to be the only one that was engaged.
BS: Yeah, totally. And I know [Denver Nuggets forward] Carmelo [Anthony]’s having a really good start to this season, but throw away the stats, because you have to watch him this season to really fully see that he’s getting it. He’s got that look in his eye. I called it “the look” in a tweet, because you know it when you see it, when a guy just has complete confidence, and he doesn’t feel like he can be stopped, and he feels like he’s the best guy on the court, and in a close game, his team’s going to win, and it’s something that you just don’t know until you’re watching the games or you’re in the building. You can just kind of feel it.
AVC: The Book Of Basketball strikes me as a massive conversation-starter. You’re ranking players, you’re ranking teams, you’re constantly questioning conventional wisdom. What has been the biggest sticking point so far? Where are you finding the most resistance to your points in the book?
BS: Well, it just came out, so it’s like one of those things where you send a kid off to college, and you don’t talk to the kid for six months, and you have no idea what’s happening. So I’ve finished this book, and I’m only just now starting to get the feedback on it, and the early feedback seems to be really good. But I haven’t had any people from cities… like somebody from Indiana who reads that I didn’t think [former Pacers guard] Reggie Miller was a superstar—obviously, they’re going to have a shit fit. Or people from Utah, that I wrote that [former Jazz guard] John Stockton was very, very, very good, but never great. That’s like fighting words to somebody from Utah. They can’t handle that. It’s like when I said that [New Orleans Hornets guard] Chris Paul was better than [Jazz guard] Deron Williams, they went apeshit. So yeah, there’s always going to be some provincialism, and that’s usually what people get upset about. The one thing I’ve been surprised about is that I really thought the Russell/Wilt chapter was going to be controversial. But the consensus from people who read that seems to be, “Oh my God, you totally swayed me.” I presented such a compelling case for Russell. I haven’t heard a counter-argument yet.
AVC: It’s a pretty thorough takedown.
BS: Yeah. It’s like an evisceration of Wilt. After it’s over, you have nothing. You can’t come back with anything. [Laughs.] But yeah, I wanted this to be a book that covered all the things I’m constantly arguing with my friends about. About Bird vs. Magic, or whether Moses was pantheon center. My buddy Joe House, who’s mentioned in the book frequently, we’ve been talking about the pantheon since we were in college. This is like a 20-year argument we’ve been having about, “Ooh, start the fifth pantheon.” So it was nice to have a book that puts all those things into one place. I guess the most controversial thing wound up being the ’96 Bulls vs. the ’86 Celtics, because there’s a large number of people where it’s cut-and-dried to them that the ’96 Bulls are the best team ever, and they obviously don’t like the ’86 Celtics. I’m getting some “You’re a homer,” that kind of stuff, because that’s my team. But the facts don’t lie. What can I tell you? [Laughs.]
AVC: A few months ago, you linked via Twitter to this insane vendetta that Oklahoma City sports-radio host Jim Traber had against OKC Thunder forward Nick Collison for basically liking Seattle too much, and not giving Oklahoma City enough respect. [The Seattle SuperSonics were moved to OKC in 2008. Collison’s exchange with Traber over the air can be found here. Warning: It may turn your brain to mush. —ed.]
BS: Right.
AVC: That’s an extreme example, but a lot of sports talk radio has that rancid tone. How do you account for that? Is that really how people want to talk about sports?
BS: I think local sports radio has really gone in the toilet. I’ve been dealing with these guys from Boston last week, these guys that I used to tweak all the time when I had my own website, and now that I’ve become more visible, they always try to take shots at me, or twist stuff around that I’ve written, stuff like that. And it’s really gotten to the point where people just throw stuff out, and you don’t even know if they’re joking. These guys said that I made up all the questions in my mailbag. You just throw out crazy shit, it doesn’t matter, and then you move on to the next topic. I think it’s really venomous for the most part in a lot of these cities. L.A. is an exception, because in L.A., it’s totally different. You just turn your brain off. They don’t talk about anything substantial, and they just want to laugh. But I just think the format’s kind of dying. It’s one of the reasons I think people listen to my podcast, because it’s not heavily produced, and I’m not screaming all the time. It’s all bluster, and there’s no substance to it. Even Mike Francesa of New York, when he had Mad Dog with him, he’d never do stuff like that. Now that he’s on his own, he’s kind of just going after everybody. He’s just angry. What are you angry about? You make $4 million a year. Seriously, what are you angry about, Mike Francesa?
AVC: Shouldn’t sports be fun? Seems pretty simple.
BS: I checked out on sports radio 10 years ago. I was in Boston. Maybe it was seven years ago, but I wrote a whole column about it. Just like, “Why am I listening to this? What is entertaining about this? It’s just people yelling at each other, and it’s not smart, and it’s not points that I haven’t thought of already, or talked about with my friends, and why wouldn’t I just listen to music?” I don’t understand why really anybody listens to sports radio unless they’re waiting for the part where they tell you if anything just happened. That seems to be why I tune in most of the time. The other style I don’t really get is the style that we do at ESPN that… I think Colin Cowherd’s actually pretty good at it, but some others aren’t as good—basically, having one guy talking to himself for 10 minutes at a time.
AVC: With no co-host?
BS: The solo guy. Just having arguments with himself. Pontificating. Who listens to this? Cowherd at least will have these really, really well-thought-out and sane angles on things that will make you think, “Wow, I never thought of that.” But for the most part, it’s just weird and rambling. You’re listening to somebody talk to themselves for 10 minutes. I always thought radio should have at least two people, or you shouldn’t do it.
AVC: What is your take on the Tim Donaghy situation? [Donaghy is a former NBA referee and gambling addict who was sent to prison for betting on games he officiated and making calls that would affect the point spread. His new book, Blowing The Whistle: The Culture Of Fraud In The NBA, was recently jettisoned due to a lawsuit filed by the league. —ed.] Could this become analogous to Jose Canseco and steroids, where everybody rushes to discredit this obviously problematic guy who also might happen to be right? How’s this going to shake out?
BS: I like that comparison. It’s a good one. Because I think the one thing they have in common is that when the Canseco stuff started, nobody took him seriously. What I can tell you is that you can go in my archives in 2002, in the play-offs, and I wrote about [veteran NBA referee] Dick Bavetta, and I wrote about some of the games that Donaghy mentioned seven years later. This is not new stuff. This is stuff that even at the time was really, really super-fishy, and I have a lot of stuff from my archives about Dick. I always joked that he was like David Stern’s Luca Brasi. I wrote that in 2002. So [Donaghy] wasn’t really breaking new ground with some of the stuff. That said, it’s hard for me to believe that somebody could just walk onto a court and say, “I’m going to decide this game one way or the other.” I think what happens is a lot of times the refs get swept up by the home crowd, or they get swept up by a comeback, or they get swept up by the guys on one of the teams bugging them, and they just decide “Fuck these guys, I’m going to call for the other team the second half.” Because you forget, the guys are humans. They’re not robots.
AVC: So you don’t feel like just out-and-out corruption is epidemic? Or is that limited to this guy?
BS: Corruption’s a strong word. We’ve seen some really fishy shit, though. I think the range from, I’m going to say, ’99 to 2002 had probably six of the 10 fishiest games that we’ve ever seen. And they all came in a row, and they were the Larry Johnson four-point play, Game Seven of Blazers-Lakers [from 2000], which is a fucking travesty… If you watch that game, some of the not-calls against the Lakers are unbelievable. [Lakers center] Shaq just basically bowling over [Trail Blazers guard] Steve Smith on the deciding offensive play of the season for Portland. No call. And then 2002, Sacramento and the Lakers, Game Six—which, by the way, is never on TV. It’s the only game they always take down on YouTube. The Bucks and the Sixers [in 2001]. Google the Bucks and the Sixers and see all the stories that come up about that series. It does seem like there was a four- or five-year stretch where the team that [the league] wanted… ideally, you would have thought the league would have wanted to win, had a habit of winning. Not just winning, but winning in these games that just had crazy, crazy fucked-up officiating. So I don’t know what to tell you. I just know that I wrote about it as it was happening.
AVC: The league is obviously working hard to keep [Donaghy’s] book from being released, but do you feel like this is the beginning of something? Or do you think this is going to be squashed fairly easily?
BS: It’s not the beginning of anything, because I wrote about this back in 2007. I wrote a huge column about just exactly what a gigantic crisis this was, and fans out there really don’t feel like the officials are that credible, and more importantly, it’s just a poorly put-together system. For the amount of money that the players are getting, and for all the talk about globalization and all that bullshit, the officiating system is not good. They don’t spend a lot of money on training. Some of these guys, who are in their 60s, are still officials. Why are these guys still officials? Who do you know at the age of 62 who has the same hand-eye coordination that he did at 42? These are all points I brought up in my piece, and I think they really need to overhaul the whole thing and decide that they want to make a major commitment to it. In soccer—I’m going to say Italy, one of those countries—the officials are forced to retire when they turn 45 or 46, and yet we have an NBA league where you’re running up and down for two and a half hours, trying to keep up with the best-conditioned athletes in the world, other than some soccer players, and these guys are in their 60s. You can’t tell me they’re not tired at the end of these games, or that that doesn’t increase the likelihood of a bad call.
AVC: What’s more surprising is how bad the baseball officiating has been in this postseason, given that the job is so much more limited. You have people whose entire job it is to watch the foul line, and they’re missing a ball falling a foot fair.
BS: I do wonder, with the Internet and stuff, if we spend so much time picking these calls apart, and if that’s starting to affect the quality of the performance of these guys. There’s almost too much pressure. Because if you’re a home-plate umpire, and you know that every time you’re calling a ball or a strike, that Fox has this camera next to… that they’re showing the pitch, whether it really was a strike or a ball… It’s kind of a weird way to do your job.
AVC: You might as well have a computer do it or something.
BS: Yeah. I’ve talked to a couple people about this. How far away are we from a system where they just put up a virtual strike zone, and if the pitch hits the strike zone, it’s a strike. And that’s it, and it just moves with the batter. I’m sure that’ll happen in our lifetime. I wouldn’t be surprised. With the NBA, I almost wonder if they need to go back to two refs. Clearly something needs to happen.
