[Bill Simmons] "Almost Famous" NBA offseason Part 1

rofl @ Ron Artest underwear comedy .

no wonder Morey didnt attempt to re-sign him.

If T-Mac had done this.. this board would have gone crazy!

 

Wow, mad props to the organization to keep such a public embarrassment under wraps.

 

Absolutely.

 

And to the players for not yapping about it. You have to imagine they were busting at the seems to tell their friends. That tells me the locker room is very close.

 

wow, i guess the rockets did have to put up a lot with ron, players, coaches, AND team management. it's safe to say none of them cared when ron announced he was going to the lakers.

i love bill simmons and he's pretty honest, sometimes over-exaggerates. ariza is the single best defensive swingman?

 

That was a pretty fun article.

Always love "Crazy Artest" stories.

 

Wow! That is hilarious, at least now it is that he's gone. I was ok with letting Ron go because of our injury situation. I thought he brought alot of toughness to the team but was clearly not the player he used to be, and wouldn't help on a team not contending this year. Man that makes me respect Morey and this orginization even more, didn't think that was possible. Come on guys! Who is with me!? The future of this team is about to begin and the third bus there is about to leave!

 

Someone needs to write a book collecting all the Artest stories, complete with eyewitness accounts from other people who happened to be there when that dude got stabbed with the table leg after the pickup game.

 

Yeah, lucky Rod Benson wasn't on the team last year . I remember a Yao (after game?) press conference where he was referring to Ron locker room incidents he couldn't talk about, but couldn't help laughing about either. This must be one of those.

 

Les Alexander might be upset after learning he's relegated to the short bus.

 

Makes me wonder if there are any Wafer stories. Rockets just seem to have no interest in signing him.

 

like quitting on your team in the middle of the 4th quarter of a playoff game? oops.

 

bill simmons, best sportwriters i've ever known about

 

good read, that just made my day. i hope he's right and that the lakers eat it.

 

While I enjoyed the story, its still the same as most other simmons stories:

1-he will ALWAYS go out of his way to hate on the Lakers. ALWAYS. You can look at any of his stuff, and its always been like that. While he had brought up a valid point about Artest that most of the media has been overlooking, this was probably influenced by his hatred for the lakers rather than true basketball analysis. If the lakers made a move that made them amazing, simmons would still find fault with it.

2-he will promote boston above all else. This one is the main reason I stopped liking Simmons. In the past couple of years, his articles have become giant Boston articles. I feel like I'm reading the Boston Globe or something rather than ESPN. Simmons will stop at nothing to show Boston love, and it kind of surprises me that he's still as highly regarded as he is. In this case, Morey means boston because he came from the celtics. Thats why simmons loves talking about him.

3-he plays favorites. not only because of the boston connection, but since he's established contact with morey, he's become one of his favorite things to talk about in his articles. Morey is now one of those characters that simmons enjoys promoting. Its always the same with simmons, once hes passed some judgement on you, you will remain that way. For example- simmons' predicted (which are almost always way off) when yao was drafted that he would be terrible. Ever since then, no matter what yao has accomplished, simmons has looked to belittle that and still try to prove that yao is a bust.

 

That Ron Artest - he crazy!

 

Come on there should be some pictures floating around with ron running around in his underwear ....... no homo

 

That's the thing. Besides the fact that Dennis was still a world class rebounder and defender at 37, as Simmons astutely pointed out, the difference between the two guys is that Dennis was just really weird and he actively made himself into that character midway through his career. Ron, on the other hand, seems to be seriously disturbed and not completely there.

Considering the acknowledgment here of the obvious implicit assumption that the Artest anecdote was garnered through Simmons' personal relationship with Morey, I'm surprised no one here has mentioned Simmons' second mention of this...

 

I remember reading some article of his where he said that statement of him claiming that Yao was a bust and Jay Williams would be a star was pretty idiotic, but there were quite a few people who thought that back then. Not sure what you're talking.
I like Simmons - yes, he's biased against the Lakers and likes his Celtics, but he's open about it(and having a sportswriter who hates them is a nice change from all the stinking loving they got all the time from all the other sportswriters.) And while he really uses too many pop culture jokes, he's a decent and amusing writer.

 

Doesn't everyone that is not a Lakers fan hate the Lakers? This can only help his popularity rather than hurt it.

Of course he does... he's been a Boston fan for life. Just like if I was writing "sports guy" like stories they would be filled with Reds and Bengals and now the Rockets, because those are the teams I followed most. Especially growing up when the Bengals had one good year and the Reds went wire to wire.. that's my childhood, of course it's going to color what I write.

That's his prerogative as a journalist. Everyone is going to ask you your opinion about everything. Would you rather he was wishy-washy and changed his mind every other time he wrote an article.

Plus, if I knew Morey personally I would probably write even more good things about him than Simmons does. I think if he met Yao a few times he would probably say all nice things about him from then on. I haven't met the guy but after following him so closely for the last four years I just wanna hug him then smack his doctors around and make sure he doesn't get hurt again.

The purpose of Simmons articles isn't hard journalism... it's fluff. Hence the "yep those are my readers" he puts at the end of every mailbag.