Bill Simmons is indefatigable, and he loves basketball – which is a sport about making your teammates better.

There. After twenty-three hours of reading Simmons’s 700-page book, these are the three things you’ll have a firm grasp on. You’ll also have a wealth of factoids and stats you can use in every sort of debate, including “if aliens came to Earth - Independence Day style – and you had to have one game to decide the fate of humankind, who would be on your team?” Typical of Simmons, this list isn’t quite enough, and he goes on to divide the list into pre- and post-1970s fate-of-the-world teams.

And list, and list and list. This book, just like his ESPN.com columns, is a 700-page collection of lists. It tries to win every argument by attrition, really. In various interviews, Simmons has alluded to this book growing into much more than he originally intended. It certainly feels that way. There is little enduring craft in this book; rather, there is an effort to overwhelm. To Simmons’s credit, though, most every argument he makes is falsifiable – and so he deserves credit for his good faith.

The footnotes, hundreds of them, are worth reading. They seem to have been written after a second or third re-read of the transcript. Often, they contain interesting detours and anecdotes. And as Simmons writes in a detour- and anecdotes-laden style, it’s saying something that his footnotes are entertaining.

The whole book is entertaining, finally. It is the sort of book that improves with one’s knowledge of the game Simmons fixates on. It holds within it the key to Simmons’s popularity – and make no mistake, he’s the most widely sportswriter in the history of the craft – and it is the same key to Stephen King’s popularity: Go for resonance every time.

Simmons writes with lists because, except for the master craftsman, transitional sentences are a drag. Simmons wants to leave you with the sort of pleasant feeling that brings you back next time – to see what he’ll think of next. It is the sort of writing that strikes you as incredibly intelligent and charming on the first read. But it is also the sort of writing that strikes you as gimmicky and predictable on the third. Once you know the way, say, Pet Cemetery works, you really don’t need to re-read it. There’s no texture or irony or creative choice you’re going to discover next time that you didn’t discover the first time. You remember the story, though – absolutely, you do – and you look forward to the next story.

All of that works especially well during a writer’s fecund period. But as he slows, or ceases to write altogether, it generally leads to works that are remembered as period pieces. The Book of Basketball, in other words, will be a best-seller that makes lots of money for its author. It will not, however, find itself the subject of sports journalism classes fifty years from now.