The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy »

Bill Simmons writes “The Sports Guy” column for ESPN.com’s Page 2 and ESPN: The Magazine. He is the author of Now I Can Die In Peace, founded the award-winning bostonsportsguy.com website, and was a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live. He commutes between his home in Los Angeles and Fenway Park.

There is only one writer on the planet who possesses enough basketball knowledge and passion to write the definitive book on the NBA.* Bill Simmons, the from-the-womb hoops addict known to millions as ESPN.com’s Sports Guy, is that writer. And The Book of Basketball is that book.

Nowhere in the roundball universe will you find another single volume that covers as much in such depth as this wildly opinionated and thoroughly entertaining look at the past, present, and future of pro basketball.

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.

* More to the point, he’s the only one crazy enough to try to pull it off.

The New York Times - Jason Zengerle

Simmons writes about sports the way fans—especially 20- and 30-something white guys who are in three fantasy leagues and dream of having their bachelor parties in Las Vegas—talk about them…Of course, if Simmons brought only passion and knowledge to the table, he wouldn't be any different from one of the countless superfans calling in to their local sports radio shows. What makes him such a successful sportswriter, after all, is that he can flat out write. The Book of Basketball is a few hundred pages too long, but it's never boring. Because practically every page features Simmons performing feats like perfectly encapsulating the career of Patrick Ewing…or vividly psychoanalyzing Kevin McHale's habit of raising his arms in victory after Celtic road wins…the book is guaranteed to hold a reader's interest.