At first glance, “The Book of Basketball” is 700 pages worth of NBA facts and figures provided by ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons, affectionately known as “The Sports Guy” by his legion of readers.

Those statistics, however, are not the heart of Simmons’ monumental work, nor were they intended to be. Simmons himself argues that basketball and its players are impossible to grasp on stats alone, which is why he conducted three years’ worth of research watching game film and reading dozens of basketball books to put the numbers in their place.

In addition to factors such as race, drugs and the overall evolution of the game and the league, Simmons’ evaluations are based heavily on how well players and teams grasp “The Secret” of basketball, revealed in Chapter 1. Ironically, Simmons learned “The Secret” from a man he heavily criticized: former Detroit Pistons point guard and New York Knicks’ general manager/head coach Isaiah Thomas.

Over half the book is dedicated to Simmons’ idea of creating a new Basketball Hall of Fame in the form of a five-level pyramid which ranks the best 96 players in league history. Utah Jazz fans will enjoy seeing both John Stockton (Level 3) and Karl Malone (Level 4) in the Pyramid, but may be bothered by Malone’s 1997 Most Valuable Player award being called the biggest “outright travesty” in MVP history.

Frequent readers of Simmons will recognize his pro-Boston slant throughout the book, as Simmons is proudly from the Boston area. The examples range from the blatant (placing the Hall of Fame Pyramid in French Lick, Ind., Larry Bird’s hometown) to the sublime (major lists in the book contain 33 entries, the same as Bird’s uniform number).  

For each evaluation of a Boston Celtics player in the Pyramid, however, Simmons uses loads of statistical and contextual information, including the player’s grasp of “The Secret,” to successfully justify his reasoning. The best example takes up an entire chapter, when Simmons declares Celtics legend Bill Russell better than longtime rival Wilt Chamberlain, despite Chamberlain’s apparent superiority on the stat sheet.

The secret to enjoying “The Book of Basketball” is reading each of Simmons’ numerous footnotes. Malcolm Gladwell, author and friend of Simmons, calls him “the master of the footnote” in the book’s foreword, and for good reason. Taking the time to read every last one adds a level of depth and humor that makes the experience with the book complete. One example is Simmons’ hypothetical reaction of an “eight-year old Mormon kid” to Malone, Stockton and former BYU guard Danny Ainge being on a list of the dirtiest players of the ’80s and ’90s.

Fans of both Simmons and basketball will thoroughly enjoy the book, as well as those who are just fans of Simmons overall, though they should expect coarser language in the book than in his columns. Basketball fans with little or no knowledge of Simmons will probably disregard his arguments, but Simmons would simply say they just don’t get “The Secret.”