Bill Simmons at his best

If you've ever looked at my links to the right, you'd see that I have a link to Bill Simmons, also known as the Boston Sports Guy (writer for ESPN). I started reading his stuff back in college, when he was still new for ESPN (after building quite a following on his own website). Don't let the "Boston Sports Guy" monicker fool you, he is quite capable of writing about more than Boston sports. In fact, he now lives in LA (leaving Boston to write for Jimmy Kimmel's show, then staying there after he quit) and is often referred to by ESPN as simply "Sports Guy."

Here's why I like him: he's just like one of us regular guy sports fans. He grew up going to Celtics games at the Boston Garden with his dad, being killed by the Red Sox and learning to hate Bruins management. He includes his wife (the Sports Gal), his dad and his friends in humorous parts of his columns, often at their expense. He has season tickets to Clippers games now (but not guilty of sports bigamy), refusing to take seats designated for the press because he wants to watch the game with the regular fans, not overweight sports writers with an axe to grind.

Anyway, I'm only writing this post for one reason. Occasionally on his site (sportsguy.net) he posts an older column (from the Sports Guy Vault) that is otherwise inaccessible unless you are part of the ESPN Insider deal, which may or may not cost money- I've never checked. The last couple days he reposted on of my favorite Sports Guy columns, on the Sleepy Floyd Game.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/vault

This is Bill at his best. He does a great job of setting the situation for you. In this case, the Lakers and the Warriors in a mismatched playoff game (the Lakers with Hall of Famers, the Warriors with, well, no one). He gives enough info about the players involved that someone who doesn't know them can follow along. For instance, he refers to Michael Cooper as the best defensive player of his day, and he's right. Larry Bird called Cooper the best defensive opponent he ever faced. This kind of knowledge is crucial to understanding how incredible Floyd's performance was. Scoring 29 points in the fourth quarter against the team that was to win the title is remarkable, it's unimaginable against defensive stoppers such as Cooper.

Unfortunately, this column will only be up for a couple more days at most. Eventually they will replace it with another classic column and you'll have to sign up for ESPN Insider to read it, which should be illegal. So, if you get a chance, check out the column. I'm sure you will laugh and learn, which is rare in today's sports writing.