Worthwhile Will Leitch essay on Bill Simmons

Another great book that covers a lot of ABA stuff is Foul - The Connie Hawkins Story.

 

Got the Simmons book as a Christmas gift (I asked for it). Have casually skimmed around it and it's not bad. Fun read, actually. I don't regularly read Simmons because his whining has turned me off, and I'm slightly old-school and a holdout again the entire "Fan's perspective is better than access!" phenomenon. But the basketball book reads kind of like an old Bill James baseball abstract. At the end he cites around 100 NBA books he read as research, so it's not like it was all off the top of his head.

 

Hopefully these hard numbers are accurate.

 

Well for starters he obviously did not look at NBA attendance figures for the 70's when he made this observation about Pete Maravich:

"His 10-year pro career spanned the depressing '70s, a decade marred by drug and alcohol abuse, overpaid head cases, tape-delayed playoff games, violent fights and sagging attendance."

 

You keep harping on one thing, Boom.

Yeah, hardly anyone did cocaine in the '70s ...

If Marvin Barnes wasn't a headcase, then I'm really a woman ...

Playoff games were tape-delayed ...

Tomjanovich's face started the fight with Washington's fist ...

... and attendance (insert whatever argument you want to in this spot because you're really trying to split hairs over something that, in the grand scheme of his point, is miniscule).

Attendance. You're really harping over attendance. Either that or you have a 14-foot raging boner for Pete Maravich and get indignant when anyone says anything remotely negative about his era.

 

You obviously have a boner for Simmons.

Go look at how many of the Top 50 played in the 70's.

 

Sorry, dude. Read the book. As I said before, if what I thought he was bullshit, I'd tell you as such.

You are hanging onto such a petty argument.

 

Look the guy wrote a book with a high percentage of errors and admits that 1/3 of book was rushed and poorly researched. He is not beyond reproach.

Assuming you are a writer I doubt you would be employed with that type of track record.

 

Whether I'd be employed or not, I seriously would hate to have my name attached to something like that.

 

And how many of the Top 50 played in the 2000s? That's a weak argument.

 

Exactly, and I know you've tried making that point with Boom before, albeit with the same amount of success. Kobe, Duncan, Garnett...forget it, they're not making an updated list, not ahead of those 70s guys!

As for errors in a book, I just finished When the Game Was Ours, by Jackie MacMullan. Really liked it, as I learned some things about Bird and Magic that I didn't know, which I didn't think was possible. But, I have found at least a dozen factual errors. People who weren't obsessed with the Lakers-Celtics rivalry in the 1980s probably won't even notice them but they are there and a bit disconcerting. I wish they weren't in there, but I also understand that pretty much every book has such mistakes. Can they damage credibility? Of course. But I also think you have to weigh them against everything else.

And it's not like Simmons is the first person to ever write that the NBA was a disaster in the late 1970s.

 

Hold on there - Simmons labeled the whole decade a disaster. Not "the late 70's" as you wrote it.