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.