The Book Of Basketball

Update: 12/14/10

** As promised, The Book of Basketball's multimedia interactive guide is up and running. Created by Austin Bell, this index allows you to follow up on any magazine articles, games, plays, You Tube clips or anecdotes mentioned in TBOB (with the links corresponding to the paperback's pages). Many thanks to Austin for his hard work getting the guide going. If we're missing any links that you like, or if one of the links is dead, e-mail Austin at bookofbasketball@gmail.com.

** You can find TBOB's paperback in stores or online (Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble or Random House with new material, more footnotes, fresh takes on Kobe/LeBron/Wade/Howard/Allen, a revised Hall of Fame Pyramid (biggest winner: Dwyane Wade) and even two new What Ifs.

** People keep asking if the paperback is dramatically different than the hardcover. The answer: no. But if I left it alone, because paperbacks run longer than hardcovers, it would have come in around 740 pages (a ridiculous length for a book that was already too long). So I re-tightened the prose as much as I could, shortened a few Pyramid and "How the Hell" entries, chopped as many extraneous jokes/footnotes as I could find, dumped LeBron's section and most of Kobe's section, dumped two What Ifs, then added the additional material (including the Kobe/LeBron rewrites) and footnotes (50-55 in all). The hardcover was 704 pages; the paperback was 706. So... mission accomplished. I never understood the concept of releasing a paperback that's exactly like the hardcover, anyway. If I had time to improve it and reinvent it a little (especially a book about a league that changes so much from season to season), why not spend the time?

** Thanks so much to everyone who showed up for the signings in New York, Washington, San Francisco and Dallas. Everyone couldn't have been nicer. I signed a few extras at every stop -- NYC Borders (Penn Plaza), DC Borders (18th St), SF Borders (Stonestown Galleria) and Dallas (Preston Road) -- for anyone else who wants a signed book.

** We had an artist named John Alexander create an oil canvas painting of the top-50 players in my Hall of Fame Pyramid. (It's incredible. Still figuring out how to make it available for purchase.) The painting will appear on our NBA Countdown set for a few weeks, then move to cushy digs on campus at Bristol for the rest of eternity... or at least until I get fired in a few years and they quietly take it down.

** Last note: In the TBOB prologue, I wrote about a Boston Herald-American photographer taking a picture of me standing on the Celtics bench looking up at John Havlicek (April, 1976, during the Celts-Braves playoff series, when Havlicek was recovering from a foot injury), then the paper running that photo on the front page of their sports section. This was the picture.