I consider myself to be somewhat of a lukewarm basketball fan. I enjoyed playing in junior high and high school, but I was never very good. I’ll follow a couple of college teams (and of course March Madness), but I don’t usually pay much attention to the NBA until the playoffs start. As a kid I didn’t read basketball books or stories, or study basketball statistics like I did with baseball. I never had an understanding of basketball history or what players were historically important.
Bill Simmons wrote The Book of Basketball for people like me. The book has several different sections — among others, there’s a chapter that outlines every watershed moment in the NBA, a chapter that discusses every controversial MVP award, and a chapter that compares Wilt and Russell in just about category you could imagine.
The meat of the book is Simmons’ tiered ranking of the 96 best players of all time. Each player’s impact on the game is discussed over several pages. Simmons reviewed old taped games and original sports stories from the early days of the ABA and NBA to construct his rankings, and I found this information to be the most interesting. It’s easy enough to say that Elgin Baylor was “great” or “unique” — it’s another to go back and see what the sportswriters were saying about him, what his teammates and opponents were saying about him, and compare his impact with his peers. You may disagree with the order of his player ranking, but ultimately, that’s really kind of the point — to spark awareness and discussion about the history of the ABA and the NBA, before the great players of the past are lost to public memory.
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