How to Build a Pyramid

     Let's kick this thing off with Bill Simmons' idea for the Basketball Hall of Fame – the Pyramid, he calls it. The ninety-six greatest basketball players of all time, arranged into five tiers: Levels One through Four, then the Pantheon - the best of the best - at the very top. Does ninety-six players sound like a good number? Some of you wish it was a smaller number, others larger. Simmons would have it fixed at ninety-six. What sense does that make? So in 2147, when the NBA celebrates its 200-year anniversary, will there really be less than one Hall-of-Famer for every two years of the league’s existence?
     Yes, says Simmons. In fact, he lays individual odds on a group of eighteen active players based on whether they could replace any of the players currently residing in The Pyramid. Honestly, did Bill Simmons think this through at all? To make my objections clear, let’s join a hypothetical dedication ceremony, already in progress, for his newly-opened Pyramid. Chairman Simmons is concluding his remarks:

September 2011
SIMMONS:…and to Tom Chambers, congratulations on a brilliant career. Your excellence in sixteen NBA seasons has earned for you the number 96, and last, spot in our new Basketball Hall of Fame. Bravo!

(Staying in the hypothetical reality: In the 2012 playoffs, the Chicago Bulls chased a league-best 68-14 record with an all-time playoff record of 16-1. Derrick Rose won the regular season and NBA Finals MVP. Let’s rejoin Pyramid Chairman Simmons for the 2012 Pyramid update ceremony – again, already in progress:)

September 2012

SIMMONS:  …and to Derrick Rose, whose spectacular dominance in the 2011-12 season earned you a place in the Pyramid. Congratulations, Derrick! And to Tom Chambers, your place in the Pyramid, along with the honor previously bestowed upon your career, is hereby revoked. Sorry you were born 30 years too soon.

     I agree with Simmons’ assertion that the current Basketball Hall of Fame does a lot of things wrong, but not throwing out the people they previously honored is one thing they do right.

The construction of the Pyramid leaves something to be desired. Let’s quote Simmons about the building itself:

“…Can you imagine climbing each level as the floors get smaller and smaller…and finally reaching the Pantheon? I get chills just thinking about it.”

I have two thoughts here:

1) I may be wrong, but Simmons seems to imply here that there’s a certain level of suspense involved. If you know anything at all about NBA history, you already know most of the names of the players in the Pantheon. His idea is really kind of anticlimactic. What’s more, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar et al are primarily the group of players people want to go see – doesn’t it annoy the public to have to climb stairs or stuff an elevator to cram into what is sure to be the most crowded level in the building?

2) Pyramids are famous for being large on bottom and small on top. If I had a four-tier pyramid honoring ten players, it would look something like this:

There would be four players on level one, three on level two, two on level three, and three on level four. Simple, right? Applying this concept to Bill Simmons’ Hall of Fame Pyramid, we could expect his ninety-six players to fill each hole by the same proportion, right? Remember, his Pyramid has five (5) levels:

This pyramid has 100 players exactly. This begs the question - why ninety-six in Bill's? Why not just go with the nice, even number of 100? Had he simply expanded his honorees to an even 100 – a 4.2% increase in honorees isn’t going to cheapen the honor – Simmons’ Pyramid could have nice, even levels: Forty-five players on level one, twenty-five on level two, fifteen on level three, ten on level four, and five in the Pantheon. Still, Bill Simmons could leave it at ninety-six and go with 41-25-15-10-5, right?

Here's how he did it:

There are more players in the top level than in the next level down? What the hell kind of sense does that make? Do more teams win sixty-plus games per season than fifty-plus? This is completely illogical.

     I think it’s highly likely that Simmons didn’t completely think this through. The other possibility involved with respect to this not-quite Pyramid is that Simmons thrives on the sort of backlash that inconsistency provides, so he deliberately constructed the Pyramid in this way for overreaction by people like me. Allowing for that possibility, I wouldn’t have bothered to point it out if the rest of The Book of Basketball was reasonably argued. No, if you are a passionate supporter of the substance of Simmons (many of his devoted fans know his work is top-notch fluff; though not a devoted fan, I fall into that camp), then to give his arguments every advantage one must assume that the entirety of this book was designed to provoke overreaction.
     Sadly, I am forced to conclude that there’s nothing particularly calculated – neither as contrarian provocateur nor as serious analyst - about Simmons’ arguments in TBOB. This is why I started with the construction of the Pyramid. It’s a small symptom of a much larger problem. To see this problem in action, on Tuesday we'll pick up with Simmons’ opening salvo, his attempt to sort out the myths and get to the truth behind the Wilt vs. Russell debate - chapter two of TBOB.

Intro: A Voice in the Wilderness

Hi. I'm glad you've decided to take a moment to read this post.

Bill Simmons is truly one of the most important figures to appear in the sports media in a long time. With a fresh and humorous writing style, he has reminded us all that sports is fun and intended to be enjoyed. Simmons established himself back when four beat writers in suits would go on TV and pontificate about NCAA violations, the merits of instant replay, whether the wild card was good for baseball, and other such topics. They had forgotten that we follow sports to hang with our friends and marvel at the otherworldly abilities of top athletes. Nothing in America beats sports for water-cooler talk, and Simmons became the one guy at work who had season tickets to every game. We wanted to hear from that guy.

Water-cooler Simmons is good for the column. He can tell an entertaining story when he writes not only about the games, but he can make us laugh about people he saw at the arena, about how a game reminded him of a movie we all like, about what he and his buddies did before tip-off. It's fun stuff. But when you want to discuss the substance and history of the sport, at length, you don't necessarily have the water-cooler guy in mind. You need a sober-minded, serious analyst. And despite the heaps of praise The Book of Basketball has received, it's really just a collection of columns by the water-cooler guy. One cannot discern that Simmons has made any particular effort to be scholarly and objective. It's a shame, because baseball fans have Bill James' Historical Abstracts to peruse; we basketball fans have Bill Simmons one-liners.

Bill Simmons' Bogus Book is here, then, as a counterpoint to Simmons' magnum opus. Someone needed to reign in the propaganda; someone needed to point out the fallacies. Someone needed to combat the army of strawmen and the slippery logic. Someone needed to point out the omissions, cut through the rhetoric, and steer the discussions back to the point. Someone needed to ask for explanations and turn assumptions back into questions. Scores of critics failed to do so - and that's why Bill Simmons' Bogus Book is here. That's why I'm here.