Bill Simmons Does Actual Reporting and Now I Know Why He Doesn't Do Reporting

I am still recovering from the shock that JemeHill has written a coherent and good column that I actually agree with on most levels. I thought that was going to be my biggest shock of the day concerning ESPN, but little did I know that the biggest shock for me would be that Bill Simmons "interviewed" an athlete and did a report on it. The problem is that when Bill Simmons "interviews" an athlete he loses everything that makes him Bill Simmons (the same jokes over and over, pop culture references, and his own little self centered world) that makes others love him and me hate him and becomes a boring Barbara Walters type interview where he pretty much just agrees to the person's face the entire time. I can see him cocking his head to the side a few times during this "interview" mustering up sympathy for Baron Davis, who no person should feel bad for, but that doesn't stop Bill from trying. I will be kind and say Bill writes a reluctant puff piece.

We're eating omelettes and waiting for Baron's cell phone to ring. The trade deadline is less than an hour away.

I wonder if Baron and Bill are wearing matching robes or pajamas? Also, what happened to Bill's vow to stay away from knowing and interviewing athletes so that he can remain unbiased and not fall in or out of love with players? I guess that went away with his vow to never mention his family in his columns.

Word is, Baron desperately wants out, but the latest update is that he's staying put.

Poor Baron. It always stinks when a good player gets traded to a bad team and has to endure playing for that team. This column just reeks of sympathy.

Except there is no "Poor Baron" in this situation because he signed with the Clippers as a free agent, after opting out of his contract with Golden State and is shooting 36% from the field this season, which doesn't seem like a great field goal percentage to me. I can't believe the Clippers opened up their piggy bank for a guy who has a career field goal percentage of 41% and 32% from 3 point range and has played 82 games only once since 2002.

Just remember, we need to feel bad for him. He is a sympathetic character because everything has not worked exactly the way he wanted when he signed with the Clippers.

Against the Suns, he looked as if he'd rather have been anywhere else, jogging around with a how-the-hell-did-I-get-here? look.

That look should be familiar to anyone who has watched several Charlotte/New Orleans Hornets, Golden State Warrior, and L.A. Clipper games. Baron Davis has never struck me as the type of guy who works his ass off and is able to deal incredibly well with adversity.

Baron is almost always smiling. He has one of those big, friendly faces, which makes him always seem happy. But not right now.

I'd be pretty damn happy if I stunk at my job and still got paid millions to do that job.

Fine, Davis doesn't stink but he is not a player I would want on my team.

The competitor in him can't believe it.

The competitor in Davis can't believe what? He has the figure of John Bagley and seems to lack motivation to become a better basketball player. I would never describe Baron Davis as a competitor.

"They don't know that I'm jogging up and down wondering if I'm gonna get traded," he says.

Hurry up someone get a Waaaaaaaaaambulance. We need to get this man into the ICU (Intensive Crying Unit) immediately. If you sign a huge contract, don't live up to that contract, admit you are distracted during games, and seem discontent then, there are going to be trade talks that will involve your name. That's the state of the business, if you can't handle it, go back to producing documentaries.

As we speak, lots of GMs are thinking about dealing for him. But then they examine his contract and decide they'd rather spend their money elsewhere.

In four years, Baron Davis will be known as "Baron Davis' expiring contract," that's what happens when you get older and your passion for the game has never been that great as it is. As much as Bill would like to paint Baron Davis as a passionate guy who is in a bad situation, it is a bad situation he caused for himself by opting out of his contract. Yes, that is right, not only is Baron Davis stuck in a bad situation with the Clippers and Bill wants us to feel bad for him, he is stuck in the situation because he voided his contract with the Warriors that was going to pay him millions of dollars so he could get millions of dollars in another city.

The tone Bill is setting with this interview is that we are supposed to feel bad for Baron, and I don't.

Only 29, Baron still believes he's a go-to guy

Let's check the numbers. He's the 3rd leading scorer on the Clippers this year, 14th in FG%, 8th in total rebounds, and 1st in assists, steals, and turnovers. He sure doesn't sound like a go-to guy anymore.

"It's gonna make me better next year," he vows, sounding vaguely like Cliff Poncier in Singles.

Now this is a motivated athlete...he has already given up on this year. Bill Simmons also throws in a early 90's movie reference and it feels very forced. I love it.

That's what they called him during his happier stint with the Warriors. "You're one of those guys who play with their hearts on their sleeves," I explain. "When you're not happy, we can see it."

Bill attempts to become a part of Baron Davis' posse by kissing his ass. It doesn't work.

The problem with Bill Simmons as a reporter is that he doesn't really care about collecting information and giving an informed opinion about a situation or person. He wants to entertain the interviewee and make that person like him. He also lacks the balls to ask any type of difficult question to an interviewee, as heard by Martin, our official Liason to Bill Simmons' podcast and loyal comment contributor to this here blog, who said that Bill did not confront John Hollinger once on his podcast about how the PER ratings need to be revised until the Boston Celtics should be the #1 team in the NBA. Bill made a comment like this in one of his columns. Then he backed down when Hollinger was on his podcast and did not even mention it. He could have at least said he was wrong to think the ratings should have been revised, but that hurts Bill's ego, so on his podcast he just stays silent on the issue.

Baron counters with the I-haven't-been-healthy riff, and it is true.

He's never healthy! He has a played a total of 408 out of a possible 656 regular season games over the last 8 years.

But I think this goes deeper. He feeds off loud crowds and bright spotlights, only now he's playing for a laughingstock in a half-empty arena. He thrives in crunch time, only the Clips don't keep games close enough for that to matter. When the 2007 Warriors made their playoff run, his iconic dunk over Andrei Kirilenko showed the best of him: degree of difficulty, fearlessness and ferocity, joy. When the fans jumped off their seats, it was as if they'd been electrocuted.

This is a stupid horseshit excuse Bill is employing for Baron Davis. Any player in the world can play well and get motivated when he/she is playing in front of a huge crowd and on a big stage. It is the great players that can play well when things are going bad and everyone is not there to watch him play. Baron Davis being a fair weather player doesn't excuse the fact that he has absolutely stunk it up this year for the Clippers. When things are going great he can get motivated but when things are tough, he shuts it down. Not the sign of a great player and certainly not a reason to make excuses for him.

As in, "You can make it out of here—you could be Baron Davis!" He loves that. Lives for it. "That's why I came back," he says. "So all these kids could see that a real person from where they come from has made it."

Maybe instead of acting like a disgruntled child, Baron could play for and get motivated by these kids that supposedly were the reason he came back to play for the Clippers. Bill would never bring this up though. He's too busy eating melon and hanging out in bathrobes with his interviewee.

Baron agreed to terms on July 1, but it wasn't long before local excitement faded. Whispers soon began about reigning star Elton Brand's maybe jumping ship. Since Brand had just spent all of June recruiting him, Baron was flabbergasted.

I don't know how all of that turned out, but if you believe this article, Davis did not sign his contract until after Brand signed with the Clippers. It doesn't really matter, Baron Davis should choose the team he wants to play for based on where he wants to play, not what other players are doing.

"Elton basically begged me to come," Baron says. "He kept saying, 'We can do great things!' And I was with it."

A lot of people break promises, like how Baron broke his promise to play out his entire contract with the Golden State Warriors instead of opting out, like he ended up doing. I am sure there were no players in Golden State that were disappointed with Baron's decision to leave the team without a decent point guard, because Baron is the only one who got screwed over in this situation...or at least that is what Bill and he want you to believe.

"Was a friend," Baron says. Past tense. Elton ignored Davis' "What's going on?" texts for three days, finally responding to say his own negotiations had broken down because the Clippers "didn't treat him right."

Bill and Baron have spent this entire puff piece talking about how incompetent the Clippers front office is and how the players hate playing there, then Elton Brand says the Clippers did not treat him right in the negotiations and neither of them seem to understand this or attempt to sympathize with him.

I guess it is supposed to be perfectly fine for Baron Davis to not be happy with the Clippers but Brand has no right to be upset with the Clippers simply because he promised Davis he would play for them. Basically the world is supposed to revolve around Baron Davis and what he wants. Never mind he would not be in this situation if he did not opt out of his contract in a desperate search for greener pastures.

He has no interest in undermining his coach, although he does say the team has no identity. "I don't think we play with enough freedom and trust," he says.

I think I am going to call John Wall the Baron Davis of the Future, because I can see Wall making the same complaint 10 years from now. Dunleavy sucks as a head coach but I don't think this Clipper team is one that needs more freedom because they stink no matter what offense is run. There is a reason Don Nelson's teams don't win championships, because at the end of the day freedom and trust is great, but believing in your coaches and running the system effectively gets you further in the playoffs.

I had a fourth-row seat for the entire Rick Pitino era in Boston; I have a PhD in Knowing When an NBA Team Has Quit on Its Coach.

Bill always knows when a team has quit on a head coach because he saw the Rick Pitino Era in Boston. That's all he needs to prove his PhD because he is a Boston fan, thereby smarter than anyone else, and that one time when Boston was struggling he saw how the team had given up. He is an expert and no one else is.

God forbid Dunleavy would find the dignity to say, "I screwed this up; I can't in good conscience keep cashing paychecks"—then quit.

Why doesn't Baron Davis admit he chose the wrong team and ask the Clippers to buy him out of his contract so he can be a free agent? Why doesn't Baron Davis admit he has screwed this year up and give his paycheck back? Because he wants to get paid and is a competitor? Well maybe Mike Dunleavy is a competitor also and doesn't want to admit he can't get the team out of the doldrums he has caused. Maybe Mike Dunleavy, who was against the Baron Davis signing reportedly, doesn't think his team (crappy as it may be) should be torpedoed by a underachieving point guard.

He keeps talking about next year. As a paying customer, part of me wants to scream, "Baron, this all sounds fine, but I still have 14 home games left this season! Get your act together now!"

That would be the part of him that actually has balls and doesn't care if everyone in the world doesn't like him. That is 1.5% of Bill. Here is what the other 98.5% thinks...

The other part just feels bad for him. Yes, incredibly, I feel sorry for someone who's guaranteed $65 million during the worst economic crisis in 80 years. The guy just wanted to come home and win a title with a friend.

This is why Bill does not get to do any reporting. He becomes a completely biased reporter unable to ask sane questions and starts to feel bad for the people he is interviewing. If Davis really wanted to win a title with a friend why didn't he try to recruit Elton Brand up to Golden State? That would have made sense instead of him opting out of his contract to sign with the Clippers and hoping Brand signed with the Clippers as well.

Let's also be honest. Elton Brand will not do well in an up tempo offense like Baron Davis likes to run. Philadelphia strugged in the half court offense this year when Brand was healthy and have thrived once he was out of the lineup. Davis and Brand would not have been peas and carrots in the same offense and the experiment probably would have failed for this reason. Elton Brand requires a half court team and Baron Davis is a fast break type player. This would not be a marriage made in heaven.

Believe it or not, Bill Simmons has an intense need to be liked. He probably does not allow comments on his columns because it is easier to ignore the negativity he receives than to accept that not everyone approves of everything he writes.

He didn't ask for any of the other crap.

It comes with the fucking territory. A-Rod never asked to have his name in the tabloids or to have the entire city of New York hate him, but they do because of his contract and that he cheated using steroids. Charles Barkley never wanted to be a role model for children, but to some children he ended up being one anyway because he was famous and played basketball. If you can't deal with it, get out of the business.

This is why I never like to spend time with athletes. Will I defend Baron the next time someone rips him?

I think Bill should stay away from doing any reporting or "interviews." This wasn't a disaster but there were times Bill made excuses for Baron Davis and it wasn't really necessary.

"I'm gonna have the best year of my career next year," Baron vows again. "That's all I can say."

He is a competitor, but he has given up on this year. But next year...it will be great, until he starts whining again...and then he will give up and start talking about next year.

I believe him. I think.

Bill does believe him. The one positive thing I can get from this "interview" is that Bill writes a pretty average puff piece.