If you've never read anything by Bill Simmons, here's what his recently released "The Book of Basketball" is like. In the middle of a mostly intelligent analysis on his picks for the top 96 NBA players of all time, Simmons provides his "all-time team for Guys You Wouldn't Have Wanted to Follow in a Bathroom Had They Been in There for a Half Hour or More."

"The Book of Basketball" is much like Simmons' columns for ESPN.com: Entertaining, lengthy, heavy on sexual references and self-absorbed. Including the index, it's 715 pages, and Simmons takes several passages from his own columns, or slightly rewrites passages from different columns.

The most impressive thing about the book is that Simmons can maintain the reader's interest throughout. There are only a couple moments where you think, "I've got to tell my friends about this part," or, "I'm going to read this about 100 more times," but it doesn't drop off, either. It's consistent.

The book begins with a fawning prologue in which Malcolm Gladwell tries to convince you how much Simmons knows about basketball. Then Simmons tries very hard -- probably too hard -- to convince you how much he knows about basketball. At times, the book reads like a job application for Simmons to become an NBA general manager.

Simmons contends that by being a Celtics season-ticket holder in the Larry Bird era, he became a sophisticated basketball fan. As evidence of this, he quotes his father (a retired school superintendent) several times and gives him the last word on a few players. He periodically gives some first-person accounts on Celtics moments, sometimes forgetting to mention that he was 7 or 10 years old at the time.

When Simmons isn't trying to impress the reader, it's wonderful to read. He watched hundreds of older games to get historical perspective and makes strong arguments about the quality of play in each era, claiming at one point, "I've seen the tapes and you can't tell me with a straight face that the '65 Celts or '67 Sixers wouldn't have gotten swept by the '01 Lakers by 25 points a game." He mixes up the facts a few times, but that's going to happen in a book of this length.

Simmons has built a style of interjecting himself into his own analyses, so we get a bunch of "This is my life and aren't you jealous?" moments. We learn that Matt Damon e-mailed Simmons after a game to give his thoughts on Kobe Bryant, that you can't really appreciate Kate Bosworth unless you've seen her in person, and that Bill Walton reads everything Simmons writes. When Simmons relates David Stern's thoughts on one issue, he writes, "How do I know this? I called the commish and asked him. We talked for 35 minutes."

As a lifelong Celtics fan, Simmons is also a little too Boston-centric in some of his thoughts. His section on Dennis Johnson is mainly about how great D.J. was in the clutch, and he never even mentions that Johnson was 0 for 14 from the field in Game 7 of the 1978 Finals -- a game D.J.'s Seattle team lost by six points.

When Simmons talks about the greatness of the 1985-86 Celtics, he never mentions that the Houston team Boston faced in the finals won 51 games during the regular season -- the lowest by any team in the finals from 1982 to 1994. Moreover, Houston was without its point guard in the playoffs, because John Lucas had a drug relapse. Again, it should be part of the story.

For me, the strangest part is Simmons' thoughts on Portland selecting Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan in the 1984 NBA draft. Here's what Simmons wrote for ESPN on that subject a few years ago.

"See, Portland taking Sam Bowie was at least SOMEWHAT defensible -- nobody knew MJ would be a superduperstar, they had Clyde Drexler (a future Hall of Famer) playing the same position, and everyone forgets this, but Sam Bowie would have been an All-Star center if he stayed healthy. ... Sam Bowie was no joke. The guy was good. ... Look, I'm not condoning the move -- Portland should have taken MJ. But the Blazers' logic for taking Bowie was, at the very least, understandable."

In "The Book of Basketball" Simmons has apparently changed his mind. He takes numerous shots at Portland for making the pick, culminating in this eye-opener:

"We've seen a revisionist history in recent years that Bowie's selection was defensible because the NBA was size-obsessed back then."

Simmons goes on to call the pick "Incomprehensible. Totally, completely incomprehensible."

As Simmons would say, "Bill Simmons, everybody!"

Sorry, that was kind of mean. I've mentioned the negative parts, but this is an entertaining book. I'm glad I spent the money, and if you do, you probably will be, too.

Matt DiFilippo -- 861-9243

mdifilippo@centralmaine.com