It is a bold undertaking, and a noble one at that, Bill Simmons’ attempt to single-handedly distill the entirety of American professional basketball history into one self-directed volume. Whatever else anyone has to say about his The Book of Basketball, full acknowledgement must be made of the Herculean task the man set before himself and the panache with which he makes his attempt.

This book sort of looks like the Bible, or anyway a Dictionary, 700 pages of information concerning only professional basketball. The reasons people enjoy Bill Simmons’ ESPN column (pop culture-centered jabs, bringing things from a fan’s perspective, a willingness to call someone out who deserves to be so, an easygoing style that leaves plenty of room for everyone to catch up) are on full display. While in many ways The Book of Basketball is his The Godfather or Avatar (and by saying that, I don’t mean to compare the two films on a quality basis, more so the epic scales they attempt), Simmons never loses or abandons the traits that have made him so popular for much of the new millennium.

This is both a good and a bad thing.

Simmons’ style on ESPN flows with a grace unavailable from the standard blog. In many ways, Simmons developed the blogging format with his Boston Sports Guy website, on which he ranted and raved in the late-90s about all things concerning his favorite sports teams. ESPN brought him on full-time five or six years ago, and since then he’s become the gold standard as far as humorous opinionated sports writing is concerned. The average blogger can’t touch the Sports Guy, because the average blogger hasn’t been doing it as long, hasn’t perfected a version of the form, and can’t deftly portray opinion in a way the average person wants to read.

Amidst this voluminous tome, however, over the course of 700 pages, his hyper-self-involved and sometimes-cutesy writing, which on the web is fine for brief check-ins and popped-off opinion pieces, grows tiresome. There are seemingly thousands of footnotes scattered throughout his book, and for the most part they are good. Many of them are also completely unnecessary. 600 pages into a book, I don’t need or want the author joking about how the book needs to end soon. I also don’t need to know that Bill and Chris Connelly are friends, or that Connelly doesn’t think Leo DiCaprio could have pulled off Dirk Diggler.

Relevant information, Bill, that’s the ticket! Or if not so much relevant, at least stories and asides that have something to do with the information from where the footnote is taken. He is well within his rights to note the time he and a friend had a ten-minute conversation with Tommy Heinsohn in a bar during college; or to relate the story of a staffer trying to explain the details of what went down between Kobe and that girl in Eagle, Colorado, to David Stern; or in-depth details, like eyewitness accounts of Hubie Brown running Bernard King into the ground, as well as ones concerning the extreme nature of the ’01 Lakers domination of a talented Western Conference on their way to a championship. The book could stand far fewer pop culture asides and comparisons (which will become dated in a generation) and more of these hilarious, interesting, relevant anecdotes.

Because, once you get past the unnecessary trivialities, there is so much for a basketball fan to love about this book. Almost too much. If you want to know anything about basketball, and I mean anything, this is the book to consult. It comes from Simmons’ perspective, sure, but everything is in here. Wading through brief asides about his mom throwing out his posters, his SAT scores, and what Bill thinks his young, racially-confused alter ego Abdul Jabal-Simmons had to say about something, I was rewarded by catching character-rounding stories about Elgin Baylor and brutal dismantlings of Rick Barry’s ego. These made the bullshit worth it. Simmons has no idea, apparently, how to stop himself, how to edit himself, what should be in and what should not, but the golden nuggets (of which there are many) more than make up for the tedious garbage.

In his column, Bill Simmons bathes in glowing sentiment for and is absorbed by his favorite teams, but this book is not as biased as one might think. For instance, Larry Bird is ranked behind both Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on his all-time player list. There’s a fair amount of Boston Celtics-related material here, but his beloved Celtics happen to be the most important franchise in the league’s history, so a healthy dose of discussion is warranted. The ’86 Celtics are presented as the greatest single-season team ever, and though Bill having watched every game that season from a seat on the railing above the locker room tunnel in Boston Garden probably has something to do with the ranking, the way he breaks down his criteria for selection and the other teams involved in the discussion at the very least establishes a sound basis for the selection. Furthermore, it made me wish I’d seen them live.

Also commendable, Simmons doesn’t shy away from discussing the problems that have plagued the Association throughout its history, most notably racism, cocaine use, and the explosion of youth and money that kneecapped things just as Michael Jordan’s generation was winding down and a new one was set to take off. He makes an impressive case for disregarding all stats accumulated during the life of the ABA (their style was too wide-open and talent too diluted, whereas the NBA’s style was too rigid and there were not enough young superstars). He discusses uncomfortable prevailing assumptions (for instance, following the ugly Kermit Washington incident, white folks wondering, “Why do I want to watch a league that allows black guys to kick the crap out of white guys when I’m a white guy?”), as well as calls out individual players for not getting the most of their talent (David Thompson, Vince Carter) or for unfortunate late- and post-career decision-making (Magic’s handling of his HIV diagnosis, repeated comebacks, and late-night television debacle).

It is hard to claim that no section of a 700-page book is wasted, but Simmons makes good use of every premise, unpacking the relevant details and following through on what he set as the goal of every chapter. The Top 96 all-time list (from Tom Chambers to Jordan) is a fun section, as is “The What-if Game,” which posits such questions as “What if the ’84 Draft had worked out differently?” and “What if the Knicks never hired Isiah Thomas?” alongside less well-known circumstances like “What if the 1960 Lakers hadn’t crashed in the perfect cornfield?” and “What if Maurice Stokes never went down?”

These last two questions encapsulate the best parts of The Book of Basketball: in the former, Simmons tells the story of the 1960 Minneapolis Lakers’ private jet, with the entire team, coaches, and staff on board, crash-landing in a cornfield in Iowa and everyone surviving, something I had no idea ever happened; in the second, he talks about Maurice Stokes, an ahead-of-his-time power forward who dominated the NBA for three years in the mid-sixties before succumbing to encephalitis caused by an on-court collision and exacerbated by the day’s prehistoric sports medicine.  In the telling of these long-forgotten stories about things no longer discussed, Simmons’ book finds its true purpose.

Then again, cutesy writing isn’t the only thing that bogs down The Book of Basketball. In the book’s lamest moments, Simmons makes the mistake of recycling vast swaths of material directly from his columns. In the profiles of Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, Robert Horry, Vince Carter, Tracy McGrady, Chris Webber, Paul Pierce, Dwyane Wade, and Elgin Baylor (in other words, almost 10% of his all-time greats list), he recycles content in its entirety from his ESPN column, for Lebron and Kobe almost their whole sections. He does no such thing in sections on Dirk Nowitzki or Steve Nash or Shaquille O’Neal, but he does for these other guys, and it’s infuriating. Which brings us back to the blogging vs. book question of style: I didn’t particularly appreciate the bloggier asides throughout this book as I plowed through its 700 pages, but I really didn’t appreciate re-reading articles I’ve already read. It seemed a cop-out, and perhaps ultimately revelatory regarding the limitations of the Simmons brand.

And that, for me at least, was important. I used to be somewhat obsessed with Simmons’ ESPN column, checking his home page daily, devouring everything new on the spot, laughing and taking mental notes and generally appreciating this guy who was just like me. But he’s not like the average fan. He knows these guys (the book-ending interview with Bill Walton is a nice touch), he’s partied with them and seen them at a function to which he was also invited. The dude has powerful friends and access, and he knows a lot of other people besides. The Book of Basketball reveals the truth surrounding the myth that Simmons is “one of us.” But beyond this somewhat petty consideration, after digesting so much of what he does in one hefty volume, I believe I’m full, and ready to move onto the next course.

Though The Book of Basketball gets tedious at times, and though Simmons’ style comes dangerously close to overshadowing the material, the big picture, that the NBA is the most exciting professional game in American sports, and that, for all its flaws, it should be celebrated as such, remains the central focus. Having devoured it, I now know things about Moses Malone, Dr. J, David Thompson, John Havlicek, Walt Bellamy, Artis Gilmore, Rick Barry, Bernard King, Maurice Stokes, and so many other luminaries about whom I knew little beforehand. For an NBA fan like myself, that’s important information, and I’ll always be thankful to Simmons for dropping so much knowledge, and by virtue of this gargantuan encyclopedia of Ball that will probably assume Coffee Table Book status in every house or apartment in which I reside going forward.

That, or at least Toilet Topping status in my bathrooms, a fate, I’m sure, by which Simmons would be pleased.