Simmons' NBA Book Top Seller

By Zach Jevne

If you just picked up a copy of Bill Simmons' new book, The Big Book of Basketball, it might take you until the end of the NBA season to finish it, or longer.

Simmons, also known as the "Sports Guy," just released his second book, all 697 pages of it. The book is all about the NBA, features 1,032 footnotes and has just topped the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list.

The popular Simmons attractes 1.4 million page views to his column, which is featured on his own ESPN Web site, "Sports Guy's World." His podcasts, "The B.S. Report," are downloaded two million times a month.

I wasn't much of a fan when Simmons first started gaining national fame with his column (c. 2002), which I was introduced through "ESPN The Magazine." His writing featured too much of a Boston-bias for my taste.

I began listening to "The B.S. Report" and reading some more of his columns a couple of years ago and began to enjoy his work a lot more. He is able to crack me up occasionally and his knowledge of the NBA is unrivaled. He is funny, but not hilarious. Sometimes I don't care for his pop culture references, especially the MTV ones.

One of his new platforms for his "well-informed, snarky" takes on sports is Twitter. Simmons has over 980,000 followers. A tweet on Tuesday night served as a reminder to watch ESPN's "30 for 30" documentary series tonight, for which he is an executive producer.

His columns are usually too wordy for me to read on a consistant basis, but enjoyable when the time is taken to get through one. For that reason, his Twitter account, "sportsguy33," is my favorite way of keeping up with what he is thinking.

As a passionate fan of the NBA, I'm glad Simmons wrote a book about the league. I respect and admire his passion and the amount of information he has on the subject. I will enjoy his book, even if it takes me three years to get through it.

This is Simmons' second book. Now I Can Die In Peace was released in 2005, a year after his beloved Red Sox won the World Series. He recently appeared on the "Colbert Report" to talk about his book.

(Photo Credit: David Shankbone)