Bill Simmons' Bias and Oversight, Pt. 1

By Austin T. Murphy

Bill Simmons, "The Sports Guy"

 

            In his 2009 publication The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons goes to great lengths in the opening chapters to establish his argument that statistics are unable to capture the greatness of individual players and teams, going so far as to call Kareem Abdul-Jabbar -- the All-Time leader in points scored -- a “ninny.”

    

Personal biases aside, especially since Simmons has long been heralded as a Celtics’ homer, it astounds me that “The Sports Guy” is incapable of separating himself from the narrative. He consistently supplies anecdotes about his own love of the game, but he loses credibility when he asserts that team success is the best way to measure greatness.

   

I have already written at length on the importance of player value, and I have previously established that team success is a summation of player success. After all, the games are played in real life, and there are scoreboards to signify the victor at the end of each grueling battle. And there is one final, impartial judge that tells us which of the two groups of men was better on any given night.

That judge is the scoreboard.

No matter how many ways Simmons wants to twist history in favor of his beloved Celtics, his argument for which players were better will always be tainted by the fact that he is comparing players who played for good teams with players who weren’t so fortunate. He goes so far as to assert that there is a “Secret” to basketball that only champions understand. But then he goes so far as to list the players that he believed to have understood the secret.

This is a fallacy. Bill Simmons has not watched every single NBA game in history, nor could he given the absence of physical footage in the early years of the league.

And so the rest of us are left to determine the credibility of Simmons’s argument -- which “coincidentally” ends with Russell being ranked as the second greatest player of All-Time, ahead of Kareem. This ranking and final determination is unfair for several reasons:

1. The two players cannot be compared with each other because not once did they suit up in competition in the same game. Kareem wasn’t drafted until 1969, the same year Russell played in his final game. The “Two Towers” were not rivals nor were they contemporaries.

2. Simmons establishes his bias early in the book with an anecdote about how he became a Celtics fan. Juxtapose this excerpt with his unnecessary “cheap shot” at Kareem and you’ll understand that “The Sports Guy” has no love lost for anyone that has played for the Los Angeles Lakers.

3. He makes the argument that Dave Cowens was more likeable than Russell due to the latter’s moody and sullen demeanor. These labels are unjustified and stuck just because of how the media and fans perceived players in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. A white, redheaded male was much more attractive as the “leader” of a team named for the country of Ireland.

4. Lastly, the idea that Russell was moody and sullen is nullified by the fact that Kareem, too, was vilified by the media due to his aloofness and introvertedness. If having a B-type personality is a knock on the Lakers’ center, then why does Russell earn a pass for behaving in the same manner?

          For the sake of simplicity, we can leave the Russell/Kareem debate until much later. It just helps early on to establish that Simmons was a non-objective observer right from the start. His excerpts have always favored his favorite team, and they will always favor his favorite team even when they aren’t talented front-runners.

   

          So we return to Simmons’ argument against statistics.

          It is understood within sports circles that you cannot glean everything you need to know from simply looking at a box score, where fabulous baskets and plays are reconstructed as simple integers. Two points are two points no matter how you scored, and the team with more points on the scoreboard will always be the victory.

          But Simmons is laboring under the delusion that people want to create a world where basketball is only played on paper. That is not the case, nor will it ever be the case. The NBA is a tremendous source of entertainment due to the incomparable skill levels that each of its athletes possesses. The simple fact that a “slam dunk” is an achievable feat that youth will always seek to accomplish is proof enough that the visually aesthetic love for the game will never go away.

          I argue, instead, that statistics help younger generations understand and quantify the achievements of yesteryear. Eyewitnesses who saw Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell play against one another are lost every year, and the lack of video footage from the league’s infancy make it nearly impossible to understand how good the St. Louis Hawks and Philadelphia Warriors actually were.

          I have also asserted previously that the unavailability of certain statistics from the early years of the NBA makes it impossible to compare different generations fairly. After all, the statistical successes of newer generations are nullified when compared against players like Jerry West and Bill Russell -- by all means, these were two of the greatest defensive players of All-Time, but you could never know this by looking at box scores. And these box scores are practically the only surviving artifacts from the league’s infancy.

          The relevance of statistics is manifest most plainly when you view them as a way of predicting what may happen in the future of the NBA. Based on the fact that the Golden State Warriors are on-track to break the All-Time record for wins in a season, it’s fairly likely that this team will go on to win a championship.

   

          In conclusion, numbers will always follow major sports, even if there are those who believe they don’t belong. But just because someone remembers a remarkable sporting event differently doesn’t mean it occurred any other way. The annals of history are locked in place thanks to the cumulation of data and victories (i.e. Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game isn’t going anywhere and neither are the Celtics’ eight straight championships).

And for Bill Simmons, a talented writer whose blatant subjectivity contradicts his role as a “journalist,” we only need two numbers -- or statistics -- to quantify what is historically the greatest team of All-Time:

72-10.

© Austin T. Murphy 2016