Fortunately, Bill's NBA draft lottery pity party ended exactly the way it should have

For your reference, he's the actual pick order for next month's draft.  The number in parentheses indicates the number of picks a team moved up or down, relative to where they should have ended up if the lottery went exactly according to script (i.e. without any surprises).

1. Cleveland (+8)
2. Milwaukee (-1)
3. Philadelphia (-1)
4. Orlando (-1)
5. Utah (-1)
6. Boston (-1)
7. Lakers (-1)
8. Sacramento (-1)
9. Charlotte (from Detroit because the pick fell outside the top 8)
10. Philadelphia (from New Orleans because the pick fell outside the top 5)
11. Denver
12. Orlando (from New York via Denver)
13. Minnesota
14. Phoenix

So as you can see, it went almost entirely according to plan, except that Cleveland vaulted up into the top spot, pushing everyone between there and the #9 spot they were supposed to occupy down a spot.  This include's Bill Celtics.  And as I've alluded to in several posts for the past month, Bill was really, really, REALLY excited about this lottery.  The Celtics did everything right--which is to say they did their absolute best to properly tank--they traded Garnett and Pierce (and Rivers), didn't rush Rondo back from his injury, and generally didn't field a team you would ever expect to do well.

But they also tried hard with what they had!  They left it all on the court every night!  No one denies this!  Bill emphasized this every time he started talking about how Andrew Wiggins or Jabari Parker would be playing for the Celtics next year; if your team is tanking but they aren't doing it "the right way" (of course you'll read much, much more about this below) then they don't deserve to reap the benefits of said tanking.  But arbiter of all things basketball, and totally unbiased C's SUPAHFAN Bill said they had followed all the rules.  So after four or five months of tweets and mentioning this subject offhand in every one of his basketball columns, the lottery was upon us.  Which led to this article about which teams had the best karma, i.e. "deserved" to do well in the lottery.  Sit back and enjoy the schadenfreude.

Joel Embiid is going to be the first pick of the 2014 draft. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

This is a very good indicator that Joel Embiid will not be the first pick of the 2014 draft.

These teams are full of it. We’re worried about his back, we’re hearing it’s bad … Hold on, I’m actually going to stand under the bull as he craps on me.

Would you?  Maybe just stay down there for a while, then.

It’s Smokescreen Central right now.

YOU CAN'T FOOL BILL!  HE'S TOO SMART FOR YOUR TACTICS, DUMB NBA GMS!  YOU MIGHT FOOL EACH OTHER, BUT YOU'LL NEVER FOOL A CERTIFIED GENIUS WHO ONCE INTERVIEWED BILL RUSSELL!  I just Googled "2014 NBA mock draft" and checked out the first ten results.  Of course this is highly unscientific; but people who take the draft seriously enough to run a site that climbs to the top of the Google rankings heap (www.draftexpress.com and www.nbadraft.net were two of those ten results--they both seem to be run by NBA superfanboys) have at least as much knowledge as Bill and probably more.  Embiid went 1st in three of the ten drafts I looked at.  Wiggins went first in the other seven; no one had Parker going first.  Two of them had Parker going second and Embiid going third.  So, the safe money is on Wiggins, for now.  You heard it here last.

And enough with the Oden parallels; unless Embiid’s pre-draft MRI reveals a career-threatening back issue (doubtful), NOBODY is passing on a franchise center who could easily be described as “The 7-Foot Serge Ibaka.”

BUT DOES HE WALK FUNNY????

Stop it.

One of Bill's most obnoxious recurring bits.  It makes him sound like a sorority girl.

He’s going first.

I doubt it.

We’re officially calling tonight’s lottery “Bleed for Embiid.”

HAHA BECAUSE STUFF THAT RHYMES IS FUNNY

With that stuff out of the way, let’s focus on the percentages that really matter — the 2014 Lottery Karma Rankings! It’s not about what the Ping-Pong balls say, it’s about what the Karma Gods say.

Which is to say, it's about how Bill feels about these teams, based on his high scientific method of being a mental 19 year old who likes the NBA a lot and sometimes watches college basketball if it's February or March.

Do your boys REALLY deserve to win the lottery? Did they handle their business the right way last season? Did they embarrass themselves with a tanking fiasco? Did they make a shady trade that inadvertently affected the playoff race? Did they do anything that made you say, “They just took a poop on their fans”?

Another horrendous recurring bit he does.  It's Reilly-esque.

Have they been so inept for so many years that their ineptitude just shouldn’t be rewarded anymore? Did they make any aggressively stupid decisions like paying Josh Smith and Brandon Jennings $78 million combined without hiring them a strong coach, or gift-wrapping a $48.5 million extension to an injured and possibly washed-up Kobe Bryant without making sure he could still play basketball three times a week?

Yeah, you wouldn't want them crapping all over their fans by signing good players or keeping hometown heroes around!

Are they owned by someone you’d describe as “an incompetent legacy kid who’d be working in a grocery store if his dad weren’t rich” or even “possibly concussed, he should seriously get his head checked out”?

Yeah!  All those things definitely are important and worth writing a column about!  Also, not that you care, but spoiler, he's going to put the Nuggets in the top three of this list.  Let me assure that "an incompetent legacy kid who'd be working in a grocery store if his dad weren't rich" is a bit of a harsh overstatement when it comes to Nuggets owner Josh Kroenke (who doesn't technically own the team yet but has been de facto owner for four years and will be titled owner soon), but isn't exactly far from the truth either.

And on the flip side, are they doing everything the right way? Do they have a real plan? Did they make an honest attempt to make the playoffs? Could you describe them as “exceedingly well run” and/or “just a solid, solid organization”?

Die.  Die die die.

Did they make one or more trades that could be described as “genuinely smart” or even “stunning in its vision and scope”? Are they a franchise that makes you say, “If Embiid/Wiggins/Jabari ends up there, they’ll take care of that guy”?

DIE.

Have they had bad lottery luck in the past? Are they due for a lottery break? Should the Karma Gods be saying, “We feel bad, we gotta hook those guys up”?

Look, bitch all you want about Cleveland getting three top picks in four years (and he's about to, or about to bitch about the idea), but they absolutely deserved Kyrie Irving, last year's draft was so bad that their victory there barely matters, and you can't say much of anything has gone right for them in the last thirty years other than winning the 2003 lottery.  But why bother expecting Bill to be logical or consistent.  That's not how you become a vertical integration machine, people.

Without further ado, the 2014 Bleed For Embiid Lottery Karma Rankings …
No Karma Whatsoever

13. Cleveland Cavaliers
I can’t decide what makes them more ineligible for karma — would you go with “two no. 1 overall picks and two other top-four picks just in the past three years, but they batted 25 percent,”

Yeah!  If you win the lottery in a terrible draft, and take one of the ten mostly worthless players available in said lottery instead of one of the four maybe average-ish players, that makes you bad, somehow!  FACK YOU!

or would you go with “rehired the same shaky coach they already fired, gave him a five-year deal, then fired him again after Year 1”?

That was a bad decision.  That team could really use a marquee player to help erase that bad decision.

When Obama appoints me the Czar of Sports, I’m making this rule: “No NBA team can win the lottery two times in a 10-year span.”  Much less three.

Totally reasonable.  Winning the lottery should reset your karma meter to negative billion jillion, not to mention how much you poop crap all over your fans if you make a crappy poop selection with that pick.

It’s too bad Brick Tamland isn’t a real person,

Not it's not.

because the Cavs definitely would have hired him as their coach/GM.

No.  He's obviously mentally disabled.  No nine-figure enterprise would put him in charge of operations.  That's just a silly thing to say.  Personally, putting aside the fact that my team didn't win the lottery, I couldn't be much happier that Cleveland did win it.  As I described a few posts ago, Bill's reaction on live TV ten minutes after the announcement was so delicious.  Oh wait, I bet it's on Youtube!  It is!  Enjoy, everyone.

12. Minnesota Timberwolves
Just for screwing up Kevin Love’s contract and letting him leave after three years (instead of locking him down for five), they’re out. Also not helping: Did you know this is ‘Sota’s 10th straight lottery? Ten straight??? From 2006 through 2011, the Timberwolves had SEVEN picks ranging between no. 2 and no. 7. They’re the real-life equivalent of your college buddy who had three kids way too early in life and now uses your fantasy football draft as an excuse to get bombed because he got out of the house for four hours.

That's a nonsensical and unfunny analogy.  Also, they've been bad for a long time--that seems like as good a reason as any for them to finally catch a break or two.  Also also, remember at the beginning of the season when Rubio was gelling nicely with Love and Bill couldn't go two fucking paragraphs without calling them a "watch them whenever they're on TV" team?  What happened, Bill?  What happened?  Did the wind change directions on you again?

11. Sacramento Kings
Headed for their eighth straight lottery and their sixth straight top-seven pick (unless someone leapfrogs them).

Naturally, someone did.

I’m an NBA Republican — I don’t think we should use the lottery, year after year, to keep propping up incompetent teams.

Always a good way to charm your readership: use some ham-fisted and unnecessary political comparisons.

It’s a broken system. We need a “Make eight straight lotteries and you’re ineligible from getting a top-three pick” rule.

Sports are definitely more fun (and inspire more fans to pay attention) when teams that are bad are forced to stay bad forever, amirite?

Also, I still haven’t forgiven Kings owner Vivek Ranadivé from trying to steal my Entertaining As Hell Tournament idea. Let’s hope he’s not the Carlos Mencia of NBA owners.

Bill, don't try to take pot shots at Carlos Mencia.  Somehow, you're not creative or funny enough to pull that off.

10. Philadelphia 76ers
Put it this way: I wrote an entire column about them last March called “10 Steps to Tanking Perfection.”

Put it this way: I wanted to link you to one of my old columns.

The Karma Gods can’t reward anyone who lost 26 straight, much less anyone who turned Michael Carter-Williams into a stat-chasing, brick-laying, award-pursuing mess who learned that it’s OK to lose as long as you throw up an 18-7-7.

NAWT A GOOD ROOKIE OF THE YE-AHH CHOICE!  NAWT LEGITIMATE!  OLADIPO'S TEAM WAS BETTAH, THAT MAKES HIM THE OBVIOUS CHOICE!  STAWP, JUST STAWP!

Even if you can’t blame Philly for taking advantage of a broken system, that doesn’t mean the Lottery Karma Gods can’t scream at them in their Soup Nazi voice, “NO KARMA FOR YOU!”

That's a Seinfeld reference!  High five!

9. Orlando Magic
Come on, they already won the lottery three times! And three good ones, too: Shaq, C-Webb and Dwight. I think we’re good, Orlando.

Yeah!  You won the lottery twice in the 90s and again ten years ago!

Just for fun, here’s your lifetime NBA Lottery Winner Scoreboard: Cavaliers (4); Clippers (3); Magic (3); Bucks (2); Bulls (2); Hornets (2); Nets (2); Spurs (2); Wizards (2); 76ers (1); Blazers (1); Kings (1); Knicks (1); Raptors (1); Rockets (1); Warriors (1).

Not pictured: the Nuggets, who have only ever picked at the spot they were supposed to pick or lower; they've never moved up, and never won the top pick despite having the best odds three different times.  They were supposed to get Larry Johnson in 1991 (although they got Mutombo instead, so whatever), and then in 2003 they were tied for having the best chance at LeBron.  Grumble grumble grumble.  Smallest violin for Larry B.

But here’s the craziest and most fascinating NBA lottery fact ever in the history of crazy and fascinating lottery facts: Through 29 NBA lotteries dating back to 1985, only one franchise ever won the NBA title with its own no. 1 overall pick. The team? San Antonio with David Robinson (two titles) and Tim Duncan (four titles, two with Robinson). How is that possible?

Why are you incredulous about this?  The answers are all pretty fucking obvious.  Because the dynastic nature of the NBA makes winning an NBA title extremely fucking difficult, with only eight teams (Heat, Mavericks, Lakers, Spurs, Pistons, Bulls, Rockets, Celtics) winning every title since 1983.  Because rookie contracts don't last that long, and many really awesome players have switched teams early in their careers.  Also, the Magic made the finals with Shaq; the Sixers made the finals with Iverson; the Nets made the finals with Kenyon Martin; the Cavs made the finals with LeBron; and the Magic made the finals with Dwight Howard.  It's also not hard to imagine the Clippers winning one with Blake Griffin sometime in the next few years.  So it's not like it's totally unattainable.

A Cereal Bowl of Karma Points

8. New Orleans Pelicans
Sorry, they totally botched the Chris Paul trade (and gave him to Donald Sterling, no less!), netted about 23 cents on the dollar for him,

Not included among Bill's asinine "does your team deserve it" factors: Did they get boxed into a corner by a superstar, do their best to acquire good assets for him, but ultimately not get much back?  Because I think that has happened to pretty much every team at some point.  Because running a basketball team under the NBA's CBA is pretty difficult.

then were summarily rewarded by the league totally rigging winning the Anthony Davis Lottery.

No.

He’s only the NBA’s third-best asset right now and the logical answer to the question, “Who’s winning the MVP trophy after LeBron and Durant are done passing it back and forth?” I think we’re good from a karma standpoint, New Orleans. Throwing a couple karma slabs your way only because I love the Brow.

How magnanimous!

7. L.A. Lakers
You gotta respect the year-to-year greatness of this franchise. Since 1958, they missed the playoffs only five times. They won only 27 games last year; that’s somehow their lowest total since 1958. They’ve never won the lottery; since 1982, they’ve never picked higher than 10th. They won 11 of the last 42 titles and appeared in 26 of the last 55 Finals. Since Elgin Baylor joined the Lakers in 1958, they’ve trotted out at least one historically great superstar in 49 of the past 56 seasons.

HOW IN THE WORLD HAS ONLY ONE LOTTERY-WINNING TEAM EVER WON A CHAMPIONSHIP WITH A GUY THEY DRAFTED????

And they’ve produced at least 3.5 million annoying fans (easily a league record).

FACK YOU!

On the other hand … they’re due to suck for a few years. Right? Why should THEY get the no-sucking-ever exemption?

Because their owner will spend well into luxury tax territory every year?  Because they are always a prime destination for every Dwight Howard/Pau Gasol/other star who is looking to get out of their current situation?  More importantly though, if the Lakers' success lands them at #7 on this list, surely the Celtics, who have even more titles (and I believe more Finals appearances; I'm not looking it up because I'm trying to finish this quickly) and have trotted out just as many all-time greats as the Lakers, belong at #6, right?  Right?

We’ll see if the Karma Gods think Lakers fans should suffer for a few years or not.

They'll be fine.

(By the way, if the Lakers win the lottery tonight, it will be one of the funniest Internet moments of all time and — since I’ll be appearing on live TV on ESPN — I’m just about guaranteed to get fired for what I’ll say afterward. I don’t know if this means the Lakers should get more or fewer karma points.)

It doesn't mean either of those things, because karma points are a construct of your tiny brain and do not exist anywhere else.

6. Utah Jazz
Door A: Hire a competent coach, then re-sign Al Jefferson and Paul Millsap (two really good players).

Door B: Let Jefferson and Millsap go; trade for $20 million in Golden State’s expirings and pick up two G-State first-rounders in 2014 and 2017 that almost definitely won’t be in the lottery; then keep Ty Corbin as your coach just to make sure your team sucks enough for 2014 lottery purposes.

My verdict: I don’t think the Lottery Karma Gods loved how this played out.

ALSO, THEY WENT TO TWO FINALS FIFTEEN YEARS AGO--SHOULDN'T THEY BE MADE TO SUFFAH FO-AH A WHILE?  THEY'VE HAD ENOUGH SUCCESS FO-AH NOW.

A Salad Bowl of Karma Points

5. Milwaukee Bucks
Let’s be honest — the Karma Gods already threw them a solid with the whole “instead of losing your team to a superior offer from Seattle, we miraculously found two billionaire hedge fund guys who want to keep the Bucks in Milwaukee even if we’re not totally sure that Milwaukee loves professional basketball” thing.

That is not karma.  That is "owning a sports team is a great investment right now, and those guys stepped up to buy the Bucks under the condition that they not move the team, because Herb Kohl and the NBA didn't want to deal with the ensuing mess."

But unlike Philly, this franchise actually tried to compete — they spent money on midlevel free agents like O.J. Mayo, Gary Neal and Zaza Pachulia, overpaid Larry Sanders and made a sincere run at 40 wins and a first-round playoff sweep. Did that sincere run make any sense whatsoever? No!!!!!!!!!!!!! Absolutely not!!!! But at least they tried … right?

So don't take a crap on your fans.  But also don't try to get better.  And whatever you do, don't be a historically great and successful team, because that disqualifies you from getting any special magic karma points.

(Also, Viva La Greek Freak.)

You like a guy who plays for this team.  Nice to know.  America's most popular sports columnist is on the case.

(Also, this is the other “Funniest Twitter-Related Outcome” for the no. 1 pick. You know, considering they just sold the team and all … and considering we just watched the same thing happen with New Orleans two years ago.)

What?  Who the fuck cares?  Also, in a funny twist, the Bucks DID end up being a big deal on Twitter the night of the draft, because one of their owners, who I can only guess has never talked to an 18 to 45 year old American male, had his cute 18 year old daughter serve as the Bucks' lottery representative on TV.  Naturally, Barstool, Deadspin, and the rest of the internet was on the case and prepared to tackle this story.  HEY GUYZ LOOK IT'S A GURL

4. Detroit Pistons
Do you penalize them for the never-ending slew of head-scratching trades and signings, all the coaches they hired and fired, and all the money they tossed away? Or do you say, “It’s time for a fresh start for DEEEEEEE-troit basssssssketball 

They're poorly run and have made some horrendous free agent signings the past few years... but... they have a memorable (if annoying) cheer that they yell in their arena!  To the top third of the rankings with you, poorly run team that is somehow different than the other poorly run teams at the bottom of this pointless, shitty list!

with Andre Drummond, Stan Van Gundy and a top-three lottery pick, followed by the down-low hiring of V. Stiviano to secretly bait Josh Smith and Brandon Jennings into saying something terrible into a tape recorder so they can void both of their contracts”?

HAHA SHE WAS THE LADY WHO TAPED DONALD STERLING!  THAT'S A CULTURAL REFERENCE!

(You know what? I’m going with the latter. The NBA is more fun when the Pistons are good. 

Sucks to be you, Timberwolves and Kings.  The league is no fun at all when you're good.  What Bill really means here is that he has fond memories of the Celtics teams of his younger days (as well as the 2008 Celtics) winning playoff series against Detroit, which is what puts those other poorly run teams out in the cold.

They cleaned house, they’re moving forward, they made a very smart hiring with SVG, and now they deserve a break, dammit. Also, Jalen Rose would start throwing $100 bills into Indiana’s crowd tonight if his Pistons won the lottery.)

Jalen Rose is kind of funny and kind of likable.  Too bad he seems to be developing a friendship with Bill.  Hopefully he's just putting on a show while the cameras are rolling, and quietly hates Bill as much as the rest of us.

3. Denver Nuggets
Turned a high-functioning, 57-win team into a dysfunctional, 36-win team mostly through organizational incompetence. So why stick them this high? Because there’s a remote chance they could win the lottery with New York’s Ping-Pong balls (thanks to the Carmelo trade from years ago). Who has worse karma than the Knicks? Isn’t this destiny? For one night, the Nuggets get to bask in the bizarro glow of James Dolan’s basketball karma. Even if they have a 0.8 percent chance of winning, once you factor in Dolan, that jumps to 25 percent easy. I have a weird feeling about this one.

As I bitched before, the Nuggets have never, ever, EVER moved up in the lottery.  This lottery did not deviate from that trend.

2. Boston Celtics
You gotta admit, 

I have to admit nothing, other than the fact that I really, really, really enjoyed watching you watch the Celtics end up with the sixth pick.

they sold as high as possible on Pierce and Garnett (three unprotected no. 1s from Brooklyn in 2014, 2016 and 2018 plus a pick swap in 2017) 

I have totally dumped on this line of thinking before, and I will do it again.  While I do think that's good value in terms of what you could expect to get for old Pierce and older Garnett, those picks probably aren't going to amount to jack shit.  This year's is going to be #17.  The Nets are certainly old and rickety and could conceivably fall apart by 2016, but I think there's a much better chance they're still a playoff team then.  2018 is too far out to predict.

and Doc Rivers (an unprotected no. 1 in 2015 that has a puncher’s chance of becoming a gem if the Sterlings fight to keep the Clippers and every Clipper decides, “I am suing to play for a different team”). 

If "puncher's chance" means a 1% chance, then no, not it does not.  If "puncher's chance" means a 0.00001% chance, yeah, I'll agree with that.

You can’t execute an impromptu rebuilding plan better than that.

OW-UH C'S TANK BETTAH THAN EVERYONE!  NO ONE DENIES THIS!  THE LAKAHS HAVE TOO MUCH GOOD HISTORY TO GET ANY DRAFT KAHHHHMAHHH!

Also helping from a karma standpoint: As a lifelong Celtics fan, I’ve suffered through three tanking seasons (1997, 2007 and 2014) … 

You fucking asshole.  Go jump in front of a bus, you self-obsessed dope.  I HAVE SUFFAHED THREE TIMES IN THE LAST SEVENTEEN FACKIN' YEARS.  ME ME ME ME.  Your teams have won like twenty championships in the last decade.  I hope your power goes out the next time you're enjoying something on TV.

and of those three teams, this was the only tanker that actually made me proud. They competed just about every night for Brad Stevens, blowing close game after close game because they didn’t have a crunch-time guy. It was the perfect tanking season, actually. I never felt like I had to take one of those 40-minute showers to get the stink off me. Throw in the way they handled Doc’s return, Pierce’s return and KG’s return and it’s hard to say the Celtics didn’t accrue some legitimate karma here. Then again, I’m a humongous homer.

That last sentence does not mitigate the 2,500 words of pure whale shit that came before it.

1. Phoenix Suns

There's no need to show his analysis.  I'll just leave you with the fart-tinged stench of that Celtics paragraph.  Just ponder that, if you want to get pissed on a sunny, beautiful late spring Friday: a Boston Celtics fan is pretty convinced that, at least in part because this bad team played harder (anecdotally, of course) than the other two bad Celtics teams from the past seventeen fucking years (keep your chins up, Timberwolves fans--It'll be your year one of these decades), they deserved to get Embiid or Wiggins or Parker.  Let that roll around in your head for a while as you think about all the fun stuff you're going to do this weekend.  If you're like me, it'll give you just enough anger and cynicism to get back to Monday. 

I didn't watch the Indy 500

But I sure did laugh at this!   Fuck ESPN with a rhinoceros horn.

Edit: for the first time in history, a Deadspin commenter says something insightful (relevant to this post) rather than posting an unfunny joke:

Coincidentally, Helio Castroneves (and I would assume his girlfriend) is going to appear on an episode of Celebrity Wife Swap on ABC in the very near future. I'm sure someone at ABC told the ESPN crew to make sure to have cameras on her at all times as a form of cross promotion for their reality show.

And that pretty much sums up sports programming these days.

Insert sad_trombone.mp3 here.

Some jackass wrote a puff piece about Simmons for Rolling Stone, and it's horrible (part 4 of 4)

Quick update before I get going: the NBA draft lottery was tonight, and the Celtics moved down one spot from 5th to 6th.  Bill was on the NBA Countdown set and had to comment on what the ping pong balls did (including giving the Cavs the #1 overall pick for the third time in four years, to which he said "The system is broken and we need a new one;" IT'S NAWT FAY-UH!!!!) just minutes after the coverage of the lottery ended.  It was wonderful.  It was beautiful.  At this point, we can just skip ahead to next Monday.  My week is already made.

Whew.  This article has been exhausting.  What's next?

No sportswriter has ever had as much success as Simmons, 

Perhaps true, although not in the way you want it to be true--Simmons is not a sportswriter.  I will agree, however, that he is richer and possibly more well-known than any sportswriter ever.  If money and exposure are your criteria for success, sure.  But I don't know why we're comparing him to Hunter S. Thompson and Grantland Rice (who did not suck, regardless of what some twat at Deadspin has to say about it) or Joe Posnanski before he went full retard for JoePa a few years ago.  Those guys don't practice the same trade as Bill.

partly because sports is now inseparable from pop culture. 

That is not true, and is something only a dipshit Simmons fanboy would say.

Even if you don't care about football, you know Peyton Manning from his ads for Buick. Or DirecTV. Or Gatorade. 

Yes, it's true.  Prior to Peyton Manning, no athlete has ever endorsed a product or crossed over into the entertainment business.  He's the first guy ever.  Other than OJ, or Bruce Jenner (I'm referring to CHiPs, not his reality work), or Alex Karras, or Kareem, or Shaq, or any of the dozens of others who have acted, not to mention the thousands of others who have pitched products.  Nope.  It's a 21st century phenomenon for sure.

By integrating with television, digital media, and Madison Avenue, sports has shifted from a pastime to a conglomerate: according to Forbes, the four major professional leagues are worth a combined $91.2 billion. 

This has nothing to do with "sports [being] now inseparable from pop culture."  This is because of cable, and more recently TiVo/DVR, which have caused sports TV contracts to go through the roof.  Sports are more commercialized now than they were 25 or 50 or 75 years ago, but that's true with most things in America.  The real reason for the explosion in franchise values and player contracts is TV money, and the reason for the TV money explosion is accessibility and the fact that most people watch sports live.  Don't be fucking dense.

This makes it harder to care about sports — who roots for Comcast, or Chevron? — 

What the fuck are you talking about?  It's harder to get excited about sports because the teams and players have more money?  

but the enthusiasm of Simmons' columns and podcasts return fans to the spirit of the pre-show-me-the-money era.

That could not be further from the truth.  Unless he's discussing a Boston team, Simmons doesn't write or speak about sports, not in the way a sports fan does.  I don't need to return to the pre-Jerry Maguire era.  I'm just old enough to remember what it was like.  It sucked, relative to today's world of sports, where I can watch my team on my phone from anywhere I have a signal.  I could care less how much money is involved.  Sports are fun because they are sports, not because aw shucks these fellas are just like regular guys!  They work in factories in the offseason!  Sports in 2014 kicks the shit out of sports in 1964.  Sorry, old people.

ESPN has both enabled this growth and benefitted from it, and is now worth $50.8 billion, making it the most valuable media brand in the world, according to Forbes, with 7 domestic and 24 international TV networks, radio networks, a weekly magazine and websites. That's a staggering sum for a network that launched in 1979 with a lineup of college soccer, wrestling, and slow-pitch softball.

Look, I'm the first person to admit that Bill has been very successful, but ESPN's meteoric rise, especially during the last ten years, is about 0.1% due to him.  Let's not trip over our dicks trying to give him credit.  In any case, speaking of the early days of ESPN, read Those Guys Have All the Fun (or at least first 300 or so pages) at some point.  Pretty interesting how it all came together, and sad/predictable that the guy who founded it got fucked out of all his potential money by scummy investors.  (To his credit, he's not mad about it.  Seems like a free-spirited kind of guy.)

Tony Kornheiser, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his sportswriting, 

Tony Kornheiser, a contrarian know-nothing piece of smug human garbage, has somehow almost won a Pulitzer.  That might be even more flabbergasting than Rick Reilly's 15 AP Sportswriter of the Year awards or whatever the fuck he has.

and a host of ESPN's lively Pardon the Interruption, calls this "a Golden Age for sportswriters," though not a Golden Age for sportswriting. 

"Those damn bloggers and their hippity hop music why back in my day only REAL sportswriters were allowed to make up bullshit and pass it off as presentable content blah blah blah condescend condescend condescend"

In spite of all these opportunities — or maybe because of them — sportswriters have never seemed more unhappy. They bicker like Real World cast members, and beef like gangsta rappers in the Nineties. 

Sweet analogies, diddley-dawg.

And Simmons is often in the middle of these tiffs, partly because people only beef up, and partly because Simmons' name guarantees website traffic, especially if he replies.

Simmons is a thin-skinned baby who is incapable of letting anything roll off his back.  He's a fool.  I'm glad he doesn't "beef" more often, because watching his sycophants defend him is the only thing more painful than reading his writing.

Deadspin is to mocking Simmons what Michael Jordan is to basketball, 

Huh?  How often do they pick on him these days?  Deadspin is the Michael Jordan of a lot of things--you might be able to say they're that good at antagonizing sportswriters in general--but I'm pretty sure Simmons isn't exactly high on their list.

so I asked Tommy Craggs, the site's editor, to summarize the case against him. Craggs denounced Simmons' "chuckling, incurious, cleverest-guy-standing-around-the-Phi-Delt-keg writing voice," and dismissed him as "nothing more than a dispenser of dull, honkified conventional wisdom about sports." He also said Simmons had been smart in not hiring Bill-Jr. clones at Grantland, adding that a site full of Simmons-ish prose "would suck."

Craggs is kind of a turd, but I can pretty much co-sign everything said there.

What is it with these guys? They're nearly as bad as Sports Twitter. Charles Pierce of Esquire wrote a snarlish review of Simmons' Book of Basketball (on Deadspin, of course), mocking his frequent digressions into gambling, movies, his friends, and strip clubs, and concluding with the words, "Get the fuck over yourself." This lead to an angry exchange of emails and posts, during which Pierce called Simmons a "mendacious, whiny little thin-skinned bag of breeze." Several months later, Simmons hired Pierce as a staff writer, so presumably, all has been forgiven. Also: Tommy Craggs, Simmons' chief tormenter, was set to take a job at Grantland in 2011, before he shit-talked an ESPN.com writer and the new job fell apart. Why do even Simmons' most severe critics want to work with him?

First of all, let's get a source on that last part.  Could be true but I've never heard it before.  Second of all, I love the idea that because someone thinks Simmons is a dunce (or that ESPN sucks in general), they should never take at Grantland (or ESPN), which comes with what is almost certainly higher pay and an unquestionably awesome support network/platform.  Old media is dying--short of Sports Illustrated, I can't think of a print journalism sportswriting job that sounds glamorous.  If you're going to get a new media job, why not swing with the big boys?  I don't begrudge anyone who does that.  "IF U NO LIKE HIM DEN HOW COME U WANT TO BEE HIM LOL" is the argument of a mouth breather.

For an impartial opinion, I asked a younger journalist who works for one of ESPN's competitors if he thought Simmons is a good writer. "As far as craft? No. His pieces are too long, there's too much I in them, and he goes on too many tangents. 

All true.  Also, he has nothing interesting to say and a 9th grade vocabulary.

But he's very smart, 

Well, we can write whoever this person is off as an idiot themselves.

he's wittier than all the people who imitate him, 

Lulz

and he has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the NBA. 

And that's what you're looking for in a sportswriter with a huge national profile--no knowledge about most sports, and a lot of knowledge about one sport, which is projected through so many layers of fuckass whining/preening homerism that it's barely even worth reading.

The Internet made Bill Simmons, and it also produced all the people who like to tear him down. 

OH THE CRUEL CRUEL IRONING!  POOR BILL!  CAN'T THE GUY CATCH A BREAK????

That's the thing about the Internet — it makes its own gravy, over and over again."

Yeah, whoever this anonymous source is, they're a fucking moron.

Once Simmons got an ESPN assignment, he quickly found an audience. But just as immediately, his relationship with the Worldwide Leader in Sports was full of conflict. "ESPN was idiotic," says Simmons, who can match any athlete for self-confidence. 

Douchechills.

"They fucked with my column for the first year, taking out jokes, and I was pissed off. 

Douchechills, douchechills, douchechills.

They were rebuilding their site around me, 

No.  No they were not.  Not even years and years later, when you had enough clout to get Grantland and the budget that comes along with it, was the country's #1 sports media company building anything around you.  Get over yourself, you pathetic horse's ass.

but they were paying me nothing. So I had a meltdown: I didn't turn in a column. I was like, 'Attica! Attica!' " He laughs. "I was probably smoking too much pot."

WHOA!  PRETTY EXTREME, DUDE!  CAN'T WAIT UNTIL YOU TURN 16 AND GET YOUR DRIVER'S LICENSE, YOU'LL BE A REAL REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE!

ESPN rewarded his work strike with a raise. "Bill likes to be in control," an insider says. 

This insider's name: Sill Bimmons.

"In the early days, he was very upset about where they placed his column, versus where other columnists were. He's a great advocate for himself and his brand."

Ah shit, OK, it was Darren Rovell.  I should have guessed.  Man that guy is a dickhead.  I hope he gets fired soon.

It wasn't Simmons' last fight with his bosses. They've suspended him from Twitter twice for tweets: for referring to Boston sports-radio hosts who worked for an ESPN affiliate as "deceitful scumbags," 

Captain tinydick strikes again.  Not that WEEI DJs are probably any less horrible.

and also for saying an interview that aired on ESPN was "awful and embarrassing." Does he think they were right to suspend him? "No, I don't."

/"tiniest violin in the world" finger rubbing motion

ESPN is owned by the Walt Disney Company, and some of Simmons' behavior — like, say, calling soccer "gay" or mocking people for being fat — makes him a far more troublesome employee than Mickey Mouse. 

The author of this piece is somehow a more worthless writer than Simmons himself.  Jesus that's bad.

Periodically, the two parties get annoyed at one another. ESPN president John Skipper once said working with Simmons was "about 99.8 percent great." ("Working with ESPN is 99.1 percent great," Simmons counters.) 

Zing?  What?

Convincing the network to do 30 For 30 required "a year of arm-twisting," he says. When it was a success, and his basketball book had been a big hit, his contract was up for renewal. "I had a little leverage." He told ESPN that he wanted his own site, or he'd leave and do it elsewhere.

Spoken with all the cunning and accomplishment of a man born on third base who believes he hit a triple.

Grantland's success, like Simmons', has resulted from good fortune as well as talent. Since 2002, Boston teams have dominated pro sports, tallying eight titles in twelve calendar years, including baseball, basketball, hockey, and football. No other city has ever had that kind of success, and it brought a lot of attention to Simmons. No wonder he loves Tom Brady so much.

What?  1) Grantland launched in 2011--Boston has won two championships since, and one happened like a week after the launch--it's not like it's been around since the days of NOMAHHHHH; but more importantly, 2) Grantland has nothing to do with Boston in the first place, other than being affiliated with Simmons.  What the fuck is going on in that paragraph?  Can anyone parse it for me?

"When we were launching, we didn't realize technology advances would help us so much." GIFs, Instapaper, wi-fi, embeddable links — all foster the ease of promoting a digital magazine. 

Again... 2011.  As in three years ago.  What the fuck are they talking about?  Wi-fi?  They started installing it on fucking airplanes three years ago.  Christ, it was available in subway tunnels like eight years ago.  It's been available in coffee shops and residences since the turn of the century.

"The iPad has been a godsend — it's probably the greatest thing that's' happened to Grantland. Nobody knew the fucking iPad was coming. I didn't. We hit at the right time."

I promise you, the iPad has about as much to do with the success of Grantland as Bill has to do with the rise of ESPN.  Christ, what a moron.

In a recent month, Grantland, according to comScore, had 4.7 million unique visitors, which represents just a sliver of ESPN's 62 million unique visitors 

YA DON'T SAY!  I could swear we were just talking about how Bill was ESPN and ESPN was Bill.

and pales compared to Yahoo Sports' 57.9 million. (Even Deadspin, the Johnny Lawrence to Simmons’ Daniel LaRusso, had 13.8 million.) 

But you can subtract 13.7 million of those, because secretly everyone who works there wants to be best friends with Bill!!!!!

But the site's balance sheet isn't the point. ESPN likely pays him more than $5 million a year, the insider estimates — not because of Grantland, but because Simmons is a guy with big ideas, a one-man vertical-integration engine.

Barf barf barf barf barf barf barf barf barf barf barf barf

Now that he oversees an empire, Simmons says he doesn't care as much about Boston teams. "It's not life-or-death anymore," he says with a shrug. 

Wrong.  Wrong.  Lies.  According to his ESPN co-anchors (who announced this live on the air tonight, so it's probably more good-natured ribbing that anything else, but I still believe there's real emotion behind it), when he saw that the Celtics didn't move up via the lottery tonight, he said "This is murder" or "This is torture."  (I forget which but it was one of the two.)  IT'S THE DRAFT LOTTERY, YOU DUNCE.  IT'S NOT EVEN THE DRAFT ITSELF.  FUCK YOU.

But that might not be true. His daughter loves L.A.'s hockey team, the Kings, so he took her to see them play his team, the Bruins. "Boston won, and I taunted her on the way home. 

Awesome.

She started crying. She was, like, six years old." A few years later, they went to another Kings-Bruins game, and this time her team won. "She was yelling and high-fiving everyone," Simmons says, "and she taunted me." Of course she did. It's in the bloodline.

What an uninspiring choice for an anecdote that's supposed to wrap up the whole article.  All I learned from it is that Bill is a asshole and his kids will probably grow up to be mean.  This has been uninformative to say the least.  Rolling Stone sucks ass and I hope it goes out of business soon.  Good night and God bless.  SMH.

Hey guess what I just realized!

It's FireJay's birthday!  Happy 7th birthday, FireJay!  Hooray!

Now go read the next post please, I just put it up.

Some jackass wrote a puff piece about Simmons for Rolling Stone, and it's horrible (part 3)

First of all, I meant to include this in the initial post in this series but forgot.  Check out the photo accompanying this piece, which presumably took up a full page in the print edition of Rolling Stone.  Look at it.  It's magnificent.  HE'S SO EDGY.  Nothing says "Authority on Sports" like an awkward dad wearing a douchey LA outfit about to throw a basketball at you.



This is your favorite "sports" columnist, America.  Good job.  You assholes.

In his columns, Simmons embodies the precise average of American maleness: He loves sports, 

Fine.

movies, 

Women love movies too.

fantasy baseball 

Much as I enjoy it, fantasy baseball is not that popular.  

and hot actresses, and is not unfamiliar with porn. 

YEAH!  THAT'S TOTALLY ME!  OMG I SHOULD WRITE HIM A LETTER AND TELL HIM AND MAYBE I'LL GET PUBLISHED IN THE MAILBAG!  YEAH TITS HIGH FIVE BRO

"I don't have a shitload of hobbies," he says. "I'm not very complicated."

You don't say.

Once a year, he goes to Vegas with several friends — 

 But why????  Tell us, Rob Tannenbaum!  Why would anyone go to Vegas?  It's hot there!

to gamble. 

No fucking way.

This is so shitty.  Why is this an article?  Even for Rolling Stone, this sucks.  Would it have been "controversial" if he went there to visit strip clubs?  More importantly, does anyone give a flying fuck why this simpleton goes on vacation?  He could be going to Vegas to check out its public library.  Who cares?  Is any of this relevant?

"He's much more interested in playing cards than in seeing naked girls," Jimmy Kimmel says, with a tone of disdain. 

OK?  I guess Kimmel is razzing him?  Is this relevant?  Come to think of it, it might be relevant, because if he's as bad at cards as he is at picking NFL games, man, he's going to have some financial problems.  

On his podcast, Simmons often talks about betting on games — up to $1,000 on individual games, or $2,000 on futures bets, he tells me. "I love gambling. I wish it was legal. But I never bet a lot, even in Vegas. Unless I'm really drunk."

HIGH FIVE AGAIN BRO!  REMEMBER THAT TIME YOU WERE SO BOMBED????  Bill Simmons is a 17 year old boy who somehow makes 7 figures a year.

He won't say whether or not he has a bookie in L.A., which means he likely does. 

SPICY!  SALACIOUS!  Who is reading this and going "Wow, I gotta keep going.  There might be something EVEN BETTER further down the page!"

And if he offers you a bet, you should probably take it — last football season, he won only 108 out of 256 picks against the spread in his column. "It was kind of a bummer," he says, though he points out that in 2006, he had his wife Kari make her own football picks in his column. "And she beat me. So if I had credibility after that gimmick, it was an accident." 

Another surprising display of self awareness.  Fair enough.  Although I suspect he is only saying this because he feels he has to, and still is 100% confident in most picks he makes.  THAT SPREAD IS WAY TOO HIGH.  THANKS FOR THE FREE TWO POINTS, VEGAS.  /team Bill didn't bet on beats spread by two touchdowns

(Kari was also at least as funny as her husband. 

Not a chance.

She said Lindsay Lohan would "look like a leather purse in 25 years no matter how much Proactiv she takes," and theorized that Katie Holmes "had her ankles removed" so she'd be the same height at Tom Cruise.)

Watch out, Joan Rivers!  Someone's coming for your "queen of celebrity bashing" crown!  Actually, now that I re-read the first part of that parenthetical, I totally agree.  Bill's wife IS about as funny as he is.

Simmons will always be associated with New England — he might love Tom Brady and Larry Bird as much as he loves his wife and two kids — but he's unsentimental about his roots. 

Wrong.  I can't wait to see how he spins this one.

"I don't think you could get him to go back to Boston at gunpoint," Kimmel says. 

If he could maintain his current role at ESPN while doing that (which of course would be impossible if he wanted to stay on NBA Countdown and he obviously does), I'm sure he'd do it in a second.  TOO MANY LAKER FLAGS ON CARS.  GOD THOSE FANS ARE JUST INSUFFERABLE.  FACK YOUUUU!

Simmons is credited as an Internet visionary, but he went into new media only because old media rejected him. 

That is completely correct.  While this article does suck, I like that it's being honest about Bill imperfections.  It's not that in 1990whatever he was like "I know exactly what the internet will be in 2014, so I'm getting on the train early."  It's that he's a bad writer and allegedly insufferable to work with, so he couldn't get an old media job.  Just because he stumbled ass-backwards into success by being good at making pop culture references appreciated by people as dumb as him (and I was that kind of person until 2004 or 2005, I admit, but I was also a lot younger and dumber then) doesn't mean we need to pretend like he invented the idea of blogging about sports.

"Boston," he says, "is where I failed."

Well, Los Angeles is where you continue to fail, but yeah, I get what you're saying.

He began his career as a lackey at the Boston Herald, the lesser of the city's two daily papers, "organizing Chinese-food orders" and covering high school teams. 

His co-workers could never understand what he was saying due to the huge silver spoon in his mouth.  I wonder how many other "applicants" he beat out to get that job?

He stood outside the Herald building on the Mass Turnpike, smoking cigarettes and "wondering what the fuck I was gonna do with my life."

Bill Simmons is, and always was, a boring clod.

Except for the addition of tall buildings, Boston hasn't changed since Paul Revere bought a horse. 

Still as racist as ever!

TV anchors and newspaper columnists keep their jobs for decades, and at the Herald, "mediocre writers were blocking my way," Simmons later wrote. 

Just as they should block the way of any sub-mediocre writer.  You know, I hate that all those guys who play minor league baseball are blocking the way and preventing me from playing major league baseball.  They've got a lot of nerve!

"I didn't do myself any favors," he adds now. "I was probably too arrogant, 

NO WAY I DON'T BELIEVE IT NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT

and could barely hide my disdain for some of the writers." After three years, "frustrated to the point of insanity," he quit and worked as a bartender. At 24, he began smoking pot, 

MORE SCANDAL.  I BET HE HAD A BOOKIE TOO.

and soon owned a four-foot purple bong. (In L.A., he discovered West Coast weed was way more potent, and one night, ended up "hiding behind the curtains in my living room for 40 minutes because I thought somebody was watching us. After that, I phased back big time.") 

BUT DOES HE LIKE STRIPPERS?????

He considered going into commercial real estate 

Dear sweet baby Jesus, can you imagining negotiating a contract with this guy?  My head hurts just from typing that sentence.

with his stepdad before he came across a new website, AOL, where even a Herald reject could write.

What if he had somehow caught on and stayed there, rather than moving to ESPN?  Would ESPN still be as cool as it was in the 90s, with AOL's sports wing filling ESPN's current role of "purveyor of incredibly shitty and celebrity-obsessed sports content?"  I guess it all depends on who gets bought by Disney in this hypothetical world.  Fuck Disney.

He wrote with a fan's dismay and delight, rejecting the idea of being objective (a Boston partisan, he openly despises the L.A. Lakers and any team from New York), 

Here are all the teams from New York he can name:

1) YANKEES!  FACK THE YANKEES IN SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER!

2) Knicks (but really, why hate them, they're not really worth hating)

3) Nets INSERT MIKHAIL PROKHOROV/YAKOV SMIRNOV JOKE HERE

4) They might have another baseball team, but I don't follow the minor leagues

5) /Bill eats paste

and attacking local sportswriters by name. No team would give him a press pass, so while newspaper guys padded short articles with boring quotes from athletes, Simmons distinguished himself by mixing in references to bands and movies (especially Shawshank Redemption and Karate Kid), 

Thank goodness.  Someone who really had their finger on the pulse of America's tastes.

and by writing long: "85,000-word essays about Rocky IV," Kimmel jokes.

OK, I will back off a little and admit that I like Rocky IV.  Non-ironically.

Simmons' early work had flaws — bitterness, cheap cracks about the manliness of female athletes, praise for the Counting Crows — 

Please delete the word "early" from that sentence and change "had" to "will always have"

but it was also funny, fresh, expansive, and even sentimental, especially when he wrote adoringly about his dad and their sports bond. 

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

That's the secret element of Simmons' success: He's the most emo sportswriter around. 

I wouldn't call it a secret.  I'd call it an unfortunate and insufferable reality.

He once penned a 3,000-word column describing how his dog Daisy died of lymphoma. It's the Fall Out Boy of sports columns.

In that it's terrible and no one should pay attention to it?  Gotcha.

In 2000, when ESPN launched Page 2, a site that mixed sports, pop culture and humor, Simmons waited for his phone to ring. "That was probably the lowest I sunk, when ESPN didn't hire me for Page 2," he says. 

What an entitled little shithead.

He was in his early thirties, still borrowing money from his parents. 

But those mean people at the Boston Herald were mean and didn't let me write whatever I wanted to write!  It wasn't fair!  I didn't want that stupid really hard to get job anyways!

A few months after the launch, he wrote a column mocking ESPN's annual awards show, and his taunts got noticed. "I was on the floor laughing," recalls ESPN's John A. Walsh. 

John Walsh is a fucking dummy.  He certainly comes off as such in Those Guys Have All the Fun.

Soon, Simmons had his first ESPN assignment. If there's a moral, it's this: Bite the hand you cannot kiss.
I'd say the obvious "moral," if you're going to give the story of Simmons's success that much gravitas, is to appeal to stupid people.  There's a lot of them and they're easy to please.  His rise to power at ESPN is idiocracy in corporate media form.  I'll give him this, though--he's probably less of a shithead than Mariotti.

I'll wrap this up later.

Some jackass wrote a puff piece about Simmons for Rolling Stone, and it's horrible (part 2)

I hope everyone did their homework since Sunday night, and read all of Simmons's greatest columns as linked by Rolling Stone in the first part of this article.  Like I said, I didn't even bother looking at what they listed, but I'm sure his column about his dog dying is at or near the top.  That's always where people who like Bill go when I tell them I think he's a shitty writer.  "But did you read the one about The Dooze?"  I sure did.  And I'm not going to make fun of him for it, but I'll tell you this much: that piece helps my case more than it hurts it.  Anyways, back to Mr. Music Critic Man and his in-depth analysis of America's least important pop culture critic.

Simmons has 2.6 million followers on Twitter. Many can't wait to tell him what an idiot he is. (The Simmons brand has a strong ripple effect: Even his wife, known as the Sports Gal, has 25,000 followers, despite not having tweeted in almost a year.) Sports Twitter is a mire of stupidity, homophobia, and violent threats.

That's an odd way to describe all the scorching hot taeks out there IMO

It's probably the most inane culture on Twitter; at least on Politics Twitter, you occasionally come across a fact.

If you're getting anything other than breaking news and jokes from Sports Twitter or Political Twitter, you're a certified dumbass with a tiny attention span.

Simmons uses Twitter almost exclusively to promote and link to Grantland material. 

No.  That is flagrantly untrue.  Simmons uses Twitter to opine (moronically) on basketball, football, and gambling, to pretend to be a baseball fan if it's September/October and the Red Sox are good, to complain about allegedly bad refereeing that goes against Boston teams, and about a dozen other things just as often or more often than he uses it to promote Grantland stuff.

He doesn't reply to people who think he's a douche, or want to punch his face. 

Well, there are only 24 hours in the day.  Come on. 

He also writes fewer sports columns than he used to, partly because TV and movies occupy more of his time. 

That's the weakest attempt I've seen anyone make to justify the fact that Simmons doesn't write, and knows nothing regarding the subjects he does find the time to write about.  TV and movies occupy "more" of his time?  More than when?  Back in the 90s, when he obviously also watched a shitload of movies?  It's not like he became a big time consumer of visual media in the last five years.  (Hey, I can relate!  But I don't get paid for this.) The guy is just out of ideas, and likes recording podcasts because that's way easier than writing.  I don't blame him for any of that, but--oh wait yes I do, fuck him and fuck his podcasts and TV appearances.

The Internet 

This isn't 1994.  I don't think we need to capitalize it.

gave him a career, an audience, wealth, 

True, true and sadly, true.

influence, 

Over what/who?  America's least informed and most obnoxious sports fans who aren't actually sports fans?

and fourth-row seats for the Clippers. 

As long as the Clippers continue to make the playoffs.

But lately, Bill Simmons is kind of over the Internet.

OOOH!  SO 21ST CENTURY AVANT-GARDE!  BILL WILL NOT BE CONSTRAINED BY THE MOST IMPORTANT AND FAR-REACHING MEDIUM IN THE WORLD!  NO!  HE WILL BROADCAST HIS PODCASTS VIA CARRIER PIGEON!

Bill Simmons' Top 10 Go-To Writing Moves

Another mid-article link.  Still not going to click on it, but I have no idea how they found ten items for that list.  Maybe they separated out "References to mediocre movies" into six or seven separate items, going movie by movie.

On a Friday in January, Simmons and his Grantland staff scheduled a celebration: drinks at a glamorous hotel, 

Maybe there will be some famous celebs there so Bill can rub elbows with other Hollywood elite!  Hey Jack Nicholson, is it alright if Bill calls you "Jackie Baby?"  He's got some ideas to share about how you could have been better in The Departed.

after work, to celebrate the site's redesign. He and I talked for three hours in his undecorated office 

NO FENWAY PARK POSTER ON THE WALL FOR THIS GUY.  HE'S A MAN OF THE PEOPLE.  Either that, or he's just too fucking simple minded and boring to do anything interesting with his office.  My office, on the other hand, contains a day-by-day The Onion calendar, a coffee mug featuring my hockey team's logo, and a printout of my baseball team's 2014 schedule taped to the wall.  Please, pretend not to be impressed.  

/Larry B continues to be lonely for good reason

at ESPN's downtown L.A. complex, and a few times, he described his ambivalence about the effects of online culture.

"I totally don't let anything affect me," he didn't say, since it's well documented that he's hilariously thin-skinned.

Before the site launched, he decided Grantland wouldn't run slideshows, which draw big traffic but are dumb, 

A fair perspective on listicles.

or print reader comments, which breed idiocy. 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA that is a lie.  A big, dirty, ugly lie.  Yes, comments do breed idiocy (just look at the comments on this blog!), but they also make a site significantly more fun and worth re-visiting.  The reason Grantland doesn't print comments is the same reason so many other popular online forums don't: it thinks it's intellectually superior to its readership.  How sad.

"Everybody was saying, 'Articles have to be short, because people have short attention spans.' And I felt like the opposite was true."

Which opposite?  That articles have to be long, because people have long attention spans?  That articles have to be short, because people have long attention spans?  That articles have to be long, because people have short attention spans?  This man is editor-in-chief of an entity that produces written content.

He built Grantland around long-form articles, the opposite of Twitter's enforced brevity, 

Yeah, that's clearly what Grantland was: a backlash to Twitter.  Where did that come from?  Where are you going with this?  God this article sucks.

and hired writers known for their cleverness and insight, 

OOH LIKE CHRIS JONES AND KLOSTERMAN!  HOORAY FOR NAVEL GAZING!

particularly with sophisticated sports statistics, rather than their snark: Jonah Keri for baseball, Bill Barnwell for football, Katie Baker for hockey, and for basketball, Zach Lowe, whom Simmons poached from Sports Illustrated by relentlessly pursuing him.

Those are probably the four best writers at Grantland.  I have to give it to the author of this piece for trying to pass them off as representative of the entire Grantland staff.

Unlike almost every other site, Grantland doesn't pick fights. 

What?  What the fuck are you talking about?  Which sites, besides tiny blogs like this that are read by no one, "pick fights?"  Are you talking about Deadspin?  They're a dumb tabloid, but they're not out to start "fights" with other sites.  This is a loaded comment with absolutely no substance.

"There's a mean-spiritedness on the Internet that we've stayed away from," Simmons told me in his office. 

"Mostly because I'm not clever enough to engage in it or understand it."

"It seems to be getting angrier — especially Twitter, which is full of coyotes, waiting to attack the next victim." One false move, he added, and you find yourself in "a 24-hour shitstorm."

Here comes the Dr. V stuff.  Those damn "coyotes," holding Bill and Co. accountable for doing something insanely irresponsible and dumb!  Who do they think they are?

His thoughts about vengefulness took on a different meaning only a few hours later, when the shit-stirrer was now in a shitstorm of his own. Two days earlier, the site had published a story, "Dr. V's Magical Putter," about Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, a female physicist who had invented a new, possibly superior golf putter. When writer Caleb Hannan investigated her background, he learned Vanderbilt was a transgender woman. Despite having agreed to her demand that he not write about her life, Hannan told Vanderbilt that he'd discovered the secret she clearly wanted to keep private, and he outed her to an investor. In the third-to-last paragraph of the story, Hannan revealed that Vanderbilt had committed suicide. It was a fascinating story, but also cruel and irresponsible.

Just ask a really smart professional journalist guy!

The initial reaction was favorable: other writers called it "a great read," and "mesmerizing," as they shared the link on Twitter. Richard Deitsch, a reporter at Sports Illustrated, said Hannan's article "might be the best I've read this month," an opinion he regretted four days later, after the article had been widely condemned. 

Good to see so many other sports journalists are just as ethically clueless as Simmons and Company.  Although Deitsch is an alright dude.

Unlike the controversy over Joe Johnson, there were genuine stakes in play. 

Well, there WERE genuine stakes in play.  The limited brain cells involved in the creation and editing of the piece kind of kicked into gear a little late to prevent a horrible thing from happening.

A political reporter called the "Dr. V" piece "absolutely, stunningly unforgivable." One Tweeter called Hannan "a fucking shit head and a murderer," and another said to him, "you harassed a trans woman until she killed herself."

First guy: taking it too far.  Second guy: just about correct.

On that Friday night, Simmons dismissed the furor — just more "mean-spiritedness on the Internet." 

HAHAHAHAHAH that's fantastic.  As much of a lamewad puff piece as this is, I love that that's included.  "HATERZ JUST JELLY THAT MY WEBSITE CONTRIBUTED TO A SUICIDE."

Oddly, a master of new media was badly misreading what was happening. 

Let me fix that for you: the fact that Simmons badly misread what was happening is an excellent piece of evidence suggesting that he is not close to being a master of new media.

The next day, he took his daughter to her soccer tournament, and during a break between games, looked online, where the angry reactions had continued. "That's when everything turned," he says, "and I started to think we'd made a serious mistake. It snowballed over the weekend, and I started going into deep self-hatred."

"At first people wanted to hold me accountable and I was like 'Fuck that.'  But then they didn't go away after 24 hours, and I actually had a moment of reflection and self-awareness.  It was strange."

The story's misjudgment was not the result of malice. The Grantland staff is more diverse, in gender and race, than most publications ("God forbid we ever get credit for that," he grumbles), 

What a fucking asshole.  What a raging cunt.

and when I talked to him in the thick of the anti-Grantland tempest, he was clearly morose and regretful. "People hate our site now," he said.

This guy needs PR training in the worst fucking way.  "People hate our site now."  That's your reaction to people being mad at you for using poor judgment and ultimately contributing to a person's death.  Wow.  WHAT ABOUT OUR BRAND?  WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

But Simmons also didn't fully understand why people despised the article. "Crazy" and "hysterical" responses on Twitter had made him "embarrassed for mankind," and he didn't agree with me that Grantland never should have mentioned the fact that Vanderbilt was a transgender woman. 

Jesus, I may have to stop calling this a puff piece.  It got dark and confrontational really quickly there.

Like a lot of people, especially people in the sports world, he's amiss in issues of gender and sexuality; a few weeks later, during a podcast in which he discussed Michael Sam, a college football player who came out in February, Simmons used the offensive phrase "sexual preference" – not out of hostility towards Sam, but out of ignorance. 

I'm going to have to bookmark this article, I am getting tired of having to Google for it when I need to link to it every few weeks.

Simmons wrote a lengthy apology for the "Dr. V" story, which Grantland posted the next Monday. 

Which, predictably, he turned into an essay about himself.

The article, he admitted, lacked empathy for Vanderbilt, and should not have outed her posthumously. His apology was thorough and almost self-flagellating, 

Because it was probably insincere, to the extent it wasn't genuine remorse but rather a plea for people to forgive his website.

but was also mitigated by his defensiveness, which ESPN Executive Vice President and Executive Editor John A. Walsh told me he found "unfortunate." In addition, Grantland published a stinging critique by ESPN baseball reporter Christina Kahrl, who is a transgender woman; she denounced the story's ignorance and "casual cruelty." "By any professional or ethical standard," she also wrote, Vanderbilt's past "wasn’t merely irrelevant to the story, it wasn't [Grantland's] information to share."

HATER.  MEAN-SPIRITED.

And ESPN ombudsman Robert Lipsyte, an accomplished 76-year old writer, added his own column, in which he called the article "inexcusable" in its "unawareness and arrogance." He described Simmons as "a talented, overextended 44 year old" with "considerable vision and celebrity." Lipsyte did not intend "celebrity" as a compliment.

And hopefully Jimmy Kimmel's comparable comment was also sarcastic.  You're never going to match up to my future wife Le Anne Schreiber, Robert Lipsyte, but that's a tasty burn.

More soon.

Some jackass wrote a puff piece about Simmons for Rolling Stone, and it's horrible (part 1)

Rolling Stone has sucked for several years (decades?) now, but usually they keep their shittiness confined to the worlds of music and politics.  In what can only be an attempt to try to draw in readership from among the legion of 18 to 35 year old males who like sports, they asked one of their writers, Rob Tannenbaum, to do a piece about Bill.  Rob may well be a good writer.  He's got a pretty well-regarded book about the rise of music videos (good), he apparently writes for The Onion or possibly the A.V. Club (good if it's The Onion, meh if it's A.V. Club), Pitchfork (barf), and Spin (meh).  So that's a decent resume.  But holy balls, this is one of the worst puff pieces that ever puffed.  To boot, it seems like Tannenbaum knows exactly fuck-all about sports.  Fuck all of this.

From Bill Simmons' fourth-row seats at the Staples Center in L.A., 

Didn't he once claim he was giving up his tickets because the Clippers were going to get LeBron or something?  Or did he threaten to give them up because the Clippers had bad luck?  Or something?  Am I imagining that?  I doubt it, although I couldn't find a link.  The point is, Bill is mentally 13 years old.

we're close enough to hear basketball players swearing. In the last few minutes of a belligerent game, full of glaring, taunting, and pushing, the hometown Clippers are in the process of erasing Dallas' comfortable lead, scoring 23 of the last 27 points. To Simmons' dismay, the crowd doesn't seem to appreciate that they're watching one of the best games of the year.

The first ten rows of any NBA arena are full of shitheads who don't appreciate what they're watching.  Yes, even TD Garden.  Assuming equal attendance, every arena sounds louder from the upper bowl.  No matter what Superfan Simmons has to say about the matter.

Clippers center Blake Griffin, 

Blake Griffin is not a center.  Anyone who follows the NBA at all knows this, but even if you don't, it can be looked up in about 4 seconds.

who has been the main target of Dallas' animosity, rises above the rim like he's wearing a jet pack and tomahawks a ball into the net. 

That's exactly how a dunk works!

The L.A. fans celebrate his feat with a mild golf clap. 

LAWS ANJULUS DOES NAWT HAVE REAL FANS!  THEY DO NOT APPRECIATE GREATNESS!  I MOVED HERE TO SHOW THEM HOW TO DO THAT!  FACK THE LAKERS!

"He could dunk with his dick and nobody here would stand up to applaud," Simmons mutters. Unfortunately, we don't get to find out.

Unfortunately?

Yup, These Are His Leaders: Bill Simmons' Best Columns

This is a link within the article.  Sadly, Rolling Stone wanted to make sure that they could accommodate anyone who read this profile and came away saying "Boy, this Simmons guy sounds like a smart cookie.  Wonder what he's written?"

Simmons was raised mostly in Boston, where every loss is like a death in the family, 

OW-UH FANS CRY HAHHHDAH THAN YO-AH FANS!  Yes, Boston, where sports fans are very passionate.  As they are in Philly.  And New York.  And Chicago.  Etc., etc., etc., narrative narrative narrative.

and even at 44, he watches sports with the delight of a kid — albeit a kid who's a multimedia mogul.

"Mogul" here meaning "Guy who has many jobs in his field, and is bad at all of them."

During the NBA playoffs, which last nearly two months and end in June, 

[Obligatory Chris W joke goes here]

he'll be a fixture on ESPN and ABC, via NBA Countdown. His 700-page Book of Basketball, despite being fatter than Eddy Curry in the off-season, 

TIMELY!  Do something about Oliver Miller next!

debuted at Number One on The New York Times' nonfiction bestseller list. He goaded ESPN into making documentaries, which yielded 30 for 30, an excellent, Emmy-nominated series he executive-produces. 

Allow me to translate: he had the initial idea that led to 30 for 30, which he now nominally oversees, while mostly just being told to stay the fuck out of the way.

His lively B.S. Report podcast, where he interviews jocks, actors, comedians, college buddies, his dad, and Barack Obama, 

But really it's mostly just the college buddies, and his voice is the male equivalent of Fran Drescher's.

was downloaded 32 million times last year, and to keep him from bolting in 2011, ESPN gave him his own well-staffed website, Grantland. 

Any chance he'll bolt whenever his current contract is up?  I'll give ESPN $20 to not enter into renewal negotiations with him.

TV, books, documentaries, digital — it's the sportswriter version of the EGOT.

Yeah, Bill is totally the sportswriting equivalent to Whoopi Goldberg or Mel Brooks, in the sense that they are humans and he is also a human (but not in any other sense).

"We have similarly thorough backgrounds when it comes to movies, TV, sports and other worthless things," says his friend Jimmy Kimmel, who hired Simmons as a joke writer on Jimmy Kimmel Live! 

And kept him around for only one really shitty season.

"Bill's very funny, he's married pop culture and sports more than anyone else, and he built his own media empire from a little blog."

I like Kimmel, and I hope he intended that to sound as condescending as it comes off in print.

That's not just tickle-tickle buddy talk. 

Huh?

Simmons started to accrue a huge following in 1997, when he began blogging on AOL's Boston website in the role of an irritant and smart aleck, under the name Boston Sports Guy. 

The level of creativity shown in choosing that handle was a real sign of things to come.

Last summer, a Canadian columnist called him "an honest-to-God magnate" and "one of the defining figures" in digital media. 

Link?  Proof that this person wasn't just Simmons operating with a pen name, or someone who really, really, really wanted a job at Grantland?

All magnates have haters; Simmons makes it easy by frequently getting into feuds.

And by being stupid, unfunny and thin skinned.  Those things help too.

On NBA Countdown, Simmons plays a slightly exaggerated version of himself: 

No he doesn't.  He is himself at all times.  The guy obviously does not have the comedic chops or self awareness to develop and play a character.

a comedic troublemaker, "the wild card who doesn't give a shit," he tells me. 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Bill thinks of himself as a rebel without a cause.  That's awesome.

"I'm part historian, part know-it-all, and part shit-stirrer. I don't hold back – that's the key."

Said with all the authority of a man who really has nothing to hold back in the first place.

During a recent Countdown, he denounced Brooklyn Nets shooting guard Joe Johnson, whom Simmons has tagged as the most overpaid player in the NBA. 

Super salary cap megagenius Bill Simmons has an extremely hot take to share: a slow 32 year old who averages 15/3/3 and makes more money than LeBron just might have a bad contract.

"Joe Johnson did not deserve to be on the all-star team," he says, so outraged and high-pitched he's nearly yelping. "Even he had to be shocked he made it." 

SHIT: STIRRED.  JOE JOHNSON: TOLD.  AUDIENCE: BORED.

After the show goes off the air, Countdown host Sage Steele turns to him, shaking her head. "You," she tells him, "are a psycho."

"I don't know how you got my cell number, but please stop calling it."

The shit has been successfully stirred: Within minutes, Twitter is in flames. 

The fact that people talked on social media about what he said on a nationally televised show broadcast by an extremely popular network PROVES that he's worth every penny they're paying him!

"Never hated a sports analyst as much as I hate Bill Simmons," I read as I scroll through his mentions, followed by "I want to punch him in the face," "He is such a douche" and "If Bill Simmons ever got in a car accident, I would be happy." 

None of those were me, either!  The last one isn't quite accurate though--I think we can all agree that any car accident-related happiness would be tied to whether his insurance coverage suffers as a result.

There are compliments, too, but, let's face it, those are boring.

Like this article is, and we're not even half done.  More later this week.