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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Bill Simmons
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August 16, 2021 - June 1, 2022
Turns out real science is involved. Nike brings many of its athletes to Oregon, pushes them through elaborate stress tests in the company’s state-of-the-art training lab, breaks down their running mechanics and foot structure (and also how those two things relate), then builds the best possible shoe for them. Like how you’d build a mouthpiece for someone’s specific mouth, only for feet, and only after measuring how someone talked and chewed food for an entire weekend.
Could those Filas have contributed to his woes? Yes, Hill’s injuries could be coincidence, and yes, Fila surely was careful in customizing its shoe for Hill. (Can you tell my lawyers encouraged that language?)
Which leads me to my world-renowned Kurt Cobain Theory: Part of the reason Nirvana gained steam historically was because Cobain killed himself at the perfect time, right after In Utero and the MTV Unplugged album, when he was hooked on drugs and slowly going insane.
He would have made Scott Weiland seem more bubbly than the dudes from Wham!
If you don’t believe me, look how we regarded Michael Jackson before he died—the freak of freaks, a celebrity cautionary tale, a creepy (alleged) child molester—even though as recently as 1987 we agreed that Jackson was the most talented pop artist ever. Or consider how Eddie Murphy would have been remembered historically had he perished in a plane crash two months after the 1988 release of Coming to America. Memories affect perceptions for better and worse. They do.
It’s all hypothetical, and we’ll never know for sure until Kobe retires and we learn if he earned the Magic Johnson Memorial Ownership Discount from Dr. Buss.
would have been remembered differently: either better or worse, but definitely not the same. We can agree on that. We can also agree that Worthy would have been the big loser here: the Clippers would have taken him second, then Utah would have taken Cummings third because he could play both forward spots
So really, this couldn’t have turned out worse unless Doc also knocked up a white female sportswriter covering the Sixers and didn’t publicly acknowledge their daughter until she became a tennis star sixteen years later. (Hey, wait a second …)
Horford) … his right leg was one inch longer than his left leg (a red flag for potential knee/feet/back
Throw in Portland’s tortured history with fragile centers and, as the years pass, it’s becoming harder to fathom that the Blazers willingly decided, “Screw the sure thing, let’s take the big guy with uneven legs who played one great college game.” But that’s what they did.
Like me, Boston GM Danny Ainge liked Durant as the top pick for one reason: Durant was the sure thing, not Oden.
Oden left you hoping he stayed healthy, hoping basketball would become more important to him, hoping his spotty college year wasn’t an aberration, hoping he developed a low-post game and a killer instinct … for a sure thing, you sure were doing a lot of hoping.
With Nash, Amar’e, Marion and Johnson, you’re set for the rest of the decade. Surround them with role players and veteran buyout guys and you’re contending until Nash breaks down, and even then, you can just shift the offense over to Johnson as the main creator. How can you give that guy up? So what if he’s insulted and doesn’t want to come back? He’ll get over it! You’re paying him $14 million a year and he gets to play with Steve Nash!
Those last three college years significantly damaged his ceiling. He never developed a money-in-the-bank shot; if anything, he bought into the whole “Sampson is a guard in a big man’s body” hype, started screwing around 20 feet from the basket and tried to run fast breaks like a mutant Bob Cousy.
If he were an intellectual genius and was planning on being a surgeon, you could see him wanting to go to school.”
For historical purposes, Houston’s “upset” of the ’86 Lakers was eventually dismissed as something of a fluke; during a fifty-month stretch from April ’85 to June ’89 in which we changed presidents, watched Rocky single-handedly end the Cold War, became terrified of cocaine and unprotected sex, lost the ability to produce decent music, made a former Austrian bodybuilder the biggest movie star alive, learned how to market black athletes, looked on sadly as Eddie Murphy lost his sense of humor and Michael Jackson transformed from biggest star on the planet to full-fledged freak and cautionary
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When you look at Ralph’s career compared to every other sure thing, it has to be considered one of the biggest flukes in sports history—a combination of bad luck, the wrong situation, and a player who was slightly overrated in the first place. Sampson flamed out as quickly as Bo Jackson or Dwight Gooden, only without the fanfare and legendary stories to keep his historical fire burning.
So what if Gail Goodrich is thirty-three and has eleven years on his NBA odometer? He wears his years well! Who wants to do a shot? And you wonder why Red Auerbach dominated the NBA for thirty years; maybe he was just the only GM with an IQ over 100 who wasn’t drunk all the time. Goodrich suffered an Achilles tendon injury, played just 27 games and retired two years later. So
Incredibly, unfathomably, unbelievably, inconceivably, an already moronic decision to overpay Goodrich (just about washed up at that point) ended up costing New Orleans Moses and Magic.
What I can’t understand: with unhappy Buffalo star Bob McAdoo grumbling about a new contract all summer, why didn’t they keep Moses around as insurance when it looked like they might be trading their star center?
We also nearly witnessed the destruction of one of the most talented players ever: by all accounts, Moses moved so many times from 1974 to 1976 that he was practically broken by the time he reached Houston; it took the Rockets an entire season to rebuild his confidence.
Big Lew’s team told the ABA and NBA the same thing: We will meet you once, we will listen to one offer, and that’s that. Do not lowball us. Give us your best possible offer first
The Celtics had just finished one of the greatest seasons in NBA history and were adding Len Bias. You couldn’t have drawn up a better young forward for that particular team, someone who played like a more physical Worthy, but with Jordan’s athleticism, if that makes sense.
They stand out. The NBA lost a potential signature player and faced its biggest drug crisis yet. The Celtics wouldn’t fully recover for another twenty-one years. Long-term, they were just screwed. Pull Pippen from the ’87 Bulls, Malone from the ’85 Jazz or Duncan from the ’97 Spurs—just
make believe they never played a game—and that’s how much Bias’ death meant.
easier … it would have been the difference between Bird and McHale traveling 200,000 hours a year in coach or 125,000 a year in first class.
These were still the days of tight shorts and awkward high fives; few players were cool and the ones who were (’Nique, Worthy, Jordan, Bernard) kept their emotions in check for the most part.
Trust me, nothing about Len Bias was contrived. He went out of his way to dunk on people, not because it made him seem cool but because it sent a message and established a tone for the game.
High comedy. Every major college player tried out for that team except for Sam. Seem like a red flag to you? Nahhhhhhhh.
It’s like the second-to-last scene in All the President’s Men, when Woodward and Bernstein wake up Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in the middle of the night to urge him to run their controversial report about corruption spreading all the way through Richard Nixon’s White House. Afraid that Bradlee’s house has been bugged, they bring him outside and fill him in on the front lawn.
“You guys are pretty tired, right? Well, you should be. Go on home, get a nice hot bath, rest up, fifteen minutes. Then get your asses back in gear. We’re under a lot of pressure, you know, and you put us there. Nothing’s riding on this except the First Amendment, the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys fuck up again, I’m gonna get mad. Good night.”
They weren’t afraid of him, and they weren’t afraid of the repercussions. That’s why the Blazers plowed ahead with Sam Bowie … and that’s why they fucked up.
Most tall people move gingerly, their posture sucks and everything about them says, “I wish I wasn’t this tall.”
The best NBA athletes don’t carry themselves that way. They glide. They never look gawky.
A few hours later, Oden walked down that same hallway looking like Redd Foxx in Sanford and Son. His posture was totally screwed up. If you saw him from behind, you would have thought it was a retired player.
The great ones always glide. They just do.
I had two different connected NBA friends inadvertently make the same joke: if Stern is Michael Corleone, Stu is definitely Fredo.
At the same time, this is bigger than all of us. What’s a frequent plot in horror movies? Indian burial grounds. What’s the most sacred animal to Indians? Buffalo. Did you really think a team could stab Buffalo in the back and get away with it?
First, they’re hard to get without connections or unless you have six figures sitting around for season tickets. If you’re sitting in them, your success in life has been validated in some strange way, even if everyone sitting in every non-courtside seat probably thinks you’re an asshole. (It’s the same phenomenon as sitting in first class and watching everyone else size you up in disgust as they’re headed to coach, multiplied by fifty.) And second, it’s the best possible seat in any sport.
I’d even argue that the twelve seats between the two benches—six on each side of the midcourt line, or as they’re commonly known, the Nicholson Seats—are the single greatest set of seats for any professional sport.
a man who mastered the hypothetical first-person plural tense over the past twenty-five years and transformed it into a common conversation device.
in rare cases the uniform makes him look slower, fatter and less athletic (like Shaq when he joined the Suns).
people like Jakob Dylan, Matt LeBlanc, Joe Biden and Adam Duritz could have remade their careers.
Just like there will never be another Magic, Michael or Larry, there will never be another David Stern.
Only the NBA taps the full potential of the Most Valuable Player concept: everyone plays against each other, it’s relatively simple to compare statistics, and if you watch the games, you can almost always figure out which players stand out.
If you combine the MVP voting with the All-NBA teams, the playoff results, and individual statistics, you end up with a reasonable snapshot of exactly what happened that NBA season,
When you apply the “best player is decided by his peers” concept to modern times, you can see its inherent dangers and potential for a lack of objectivity. Critics are critics for a reason—it’s their job to objectively evaluate things. You can’t expect players to suddenly become impartial reviewers.
NBA players should only be voting for things like Worst B.O., Guy You Don’t Want to Leave Alone with Your Girlfriend, Least Likely Star to Pick Up a Check, Toughest Poker Competitor, Ugliest Player and Craziest Mothafucka You Don’t Want to Cross.
Starting in the early nineties, a more subtle problem developed: a group almost entirely composed of middle-aged white journalists who couldn’t identify with the current direction of the league, missed the access they once had and openly despised the new generation of me-first, chest-pounding, posse-having, tattoo-showing, commercial-shooting overpaid stars were being asked to objectively decide on the MVP.
Just like the political media can affect a primary or a presidential campaign, the basketball media can swing an MVP race. They shape every argument and story for ten months, with their overriding goal being to discuss potentially provocative angles, stories or controversies that haven’t been picked apart yet.
