I know, I know. No posts about the timelessness of J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis in this book thread.

No, the main reason I am writing is to send you guys the link to an epic basketball book, written by one of the brilliant basketball minds of the last 25 years, the late great Dick DeVenzio.

Dick ran the Point Guard Basketball College (now known as the PGC Basketball Camp) until he passed away from cancer in 2001. The Basketball world is less bright since his passing.

www.amazon.com/Stuff-Good-Players-Should-Know/dp/0910305005

Great read for any of you serious students of the game out there.

I've been on and off reading the Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons for ages now. So far I haven't been incredibly enthused by it. I'm hoping once it starts talking about basketball in the 90s and forward I'll get more into it.

The endless pages on how Russell dominated Wilt is wearing thin. Bill proved his point in a paragraph and it adding on during the next 50 pages.

pants wrote:
Yeah I avoided that one. Might read it at some point, but Simmons peaked at the discussion of hoops with Malcolm Gladwell, in my opinion. Gladwell is a smart dude, it would be fun talking sports with him.

This entire list qualifies as enlightened wisdom as well:
www.amazon.com/John-Wooden/e/B000APU8ZC/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

I like Simmons book a lot. I'm (finally) almost done with it. Definitely been taking me forever. He has had some good columns online lately, but before that I thought he was getting kind of stale. So then his book came along and it was waaaaaay better than most of his columns at the time. I think he's book is quite solid and really pretty funny. It's a little slow going at first, I definitely agree there.

I love the Simmons book. I'm not done with it either, even though I started it over a year ago haha. But I'm almost done, I just read the Tim Duncan & Wilt Chamberlain parts the other night, so I think now I just have the top 5 players of all time and then some sort of concluding chapter.

I think the way he did all of the footnotes is soooooo great. This is the type of book I could see myself picking up and reading again in 5 years, or referring to from time to time if I want to know what he said about a former player or predicted about a current player. Definitely a must have in my opinion.

Awesome thread. Was seriously considering adding this thread the other day but you beat me to it.

The Simmons book is great, but the historical stuff gets very dry. He writes so much under the context of 'assumed knowledge' as if you have also seen every game or know exactly who (player x ) is. He doesnt explain things well enough. Unless you know these players, it's hard to laugh at his mullet jokes, or whatever. I fear his stretch pop culture references will be impossible to understand for someone who reads the book in, say, 10 years. Overall very enjoyable. Never fully finished though.

Paul Shirley's Can I Keep my Jersey is amazing.

As I said in the other thread Phil Jackson's the Last Season has been fantastic so far. Those of you who like behind the scenes stuff will truly adore. And there is a chapter on the Wolves/Lakers WCF series towards the end that I havent gotten to.

Yep I have The Last Season and loved it. It's an easy and relatively quick read too, unlike the endless Simmons book. It was a lot better than I thought it would be. I thought it might be kind of watered down, but it was very candid overall. He rips Kobe a lot. He likes Shaq, but also rips him and his conditioning and work habits occassionally. And his love for Rick Fox makes me ............

Nice. The funny thing is that there are so many different types of basketball books- biographies, memoirs, instructionals, philosophical books, novels...

The one I led the thread with is great, it's a player's book for elite level players (none of that "here's how you shoot a jumpshot" stuff). There are a few others, the Wooden anthology is somewhere between philophy and religion in our house...