And why not? Since we're now apparently a detective agency and a recruiting service, I see no reason why we can't also serve as Bill Simmons' spam filter.

Here's Danny's e-mail to us:

Hello Folks:

I know you guys are usually big fans of Bill Simmons. And while I admit his columns have a certain appeal, I have long objected to (among other things) The Ewing Theory for one simple reason: it's not true.

I am a lifelong, diehard Knicks fan (spare me the cackles, but yes, I'm closely monitoring the AI situation as if it's going to matter) and have always taken offense to The Ewing Theory, which I believe unfairly maligns my favorite all-time athlete (again, no comments). And so I simply couldn't help but write ol' Bill (though I'm well aware this is the kind of endeavor your staff might deem pathetic). In any event, I've sent the following email to Bill several times, each time with a new smarmy introduction, and have yet to receive a response. I figured with his voluminous mailbags, I might actually get a sniff. Nope. Must be too busy on his porntastic book tour!

I am forwarding the email (most recently sent on November 16) to you guys to see if you have any interest in publishing it or a portion of it. Maybe I'm just way off base here. But I think Patrick Ewing doesn't deserve the kind of treatment he has received from Bill over the years (despite his relatively high ranking in Bill's pyramid or new Hall of Fame or whatever it is . . . seriously, this guy really thinks he is the basketball cosmos). And who is going to defend a multi-million dollar athlete in these hard economic times? Well, that would be me.

Let me know what you think.

Danny Lanzetta

And here's what Danny wrote Simmons (he does have a point):

Oh Bill.

I know how high on yourself you must be, what with a New York Times bestseller that must make you feel like a stunned Woody Allen after he got the girl in one of his Scarlett Johanson-less, pre-I-suck-now-because-I-make-films-that-are-parodies-of-the-ones-I-made-in-the-seventies-and-which-don't-have-as-much-cultural-relevance-as-they-did-then-because-the-nerdy-Jewish-type-can-get-the-girl-just-as-easily-as-anyone-else-if-he-has-the-right-job movies. (I'm prcaticing my Bill Simmons writing, though it's a bit difficult since I WAS an English major in college. And I know how you feel about those snobs.)

Mostly, I'm just surprised that a guy like you, a purported sports man-of-the-sports people (boy, I could get used to this hyphenated writing)won't print my email, which so thoroughly debunks your egregious Ewing Theory. I read your Ewing book excerpt too in which you call Ewing a Top 50 player of all time, but never say anything remotely complimentary about the man.

Here's another chance, Mr. Bill. You were once part of the sports anti-establishment, but your reticence to respond shows how you're now just another one of the frauds. Here is my argument. Again. Another chance to show you don't mind a good fight.

P.S. You like pop culture stuff. Have your staff fact-check this little ditty. I was once the lead on a CBS television series called "Brooklyn Bridge." We did lots of shows about the Brooklyn Dodgers. Marion Ross was my grandmother. My stage name was Danny Gerard. Look it up.

For years I have been reading (or rather skimming) your voluminous columns. While I occasionally laugh (The Mike and the Mad Dog column stands out in particular), I have grown tired of the smugly populist tone of EVERY SINGLE COLUMN (ever thought about diversifying your voice? You probably missed that class when you were watching every single zeitgeist film of the 80s and 90s so you could make endless, smarmy pop culture references in your 50,000 word articles).

Even that I could live with. The voice is your hook. But isn't it time a real Knicks fan debunked this completely misguided Ewing Theory you parade around as some sort of unassailable sports philosophy? I know more about the Ewing-era Knicks than just about any fan you've ever run into, and I can say, unequivocally, that the Knicks were NEVER better without Ewing than they were with him.

Much of this has to do with just watching the team during those years. But I'll provide some evidence if you like and let's see if you have the "nutsack" (that's a real Bill Simmons kind of word to use, right?) to write back. In late 1997, when Andrew Lang fouled Ewing and sent him to the floor, shattering Ewing's wrist and sidelining him for the season (the short-lived, second round comeback Ewing tried to make against Indiana surely can't be held against him, can it?), the Knicks were 15-11. They finished 43-39. That's 28-28 after the Ewing injury for the mathematically challenged. The Knicks won 57 games the year before, and many believe they could have legitimately challenged a 69-win Bulls club (remember the last game of the regular season in Chicago? How the Knicks beat a Bulls team gunning for back-to-back 70 win campaigns? Think MJ didn't want that one?) were it not for the idiotic suspensions that resulted from the Charlie Ward/PJ Brown shenanigans at the end of Game Five of the conference semis.

Yes, in the '98 playoffs, the Ewing-less Knicks did beat the Heat in the first round (a 2 vs. 7 matchup)in five hotly-contested games before falling to a superior Pacers team with a hobbled but valiant Ewing (who should have never tried to come back. But that wasn't his style.) The Knicks also upended a higher-seeded Heat team in each of the next two seasons (the magical Finals run in ‘99 and also in 2000) with Ewing. When Ewing got hurt after Game Two of the Eastern Finals against the Pacers in ‘99, the Knicks – buoyed by a sterling effort by another unfairly maligned player, Allan Houston – were able to ride the adrenaline of Camby and Spree to the Finals. But how did they do against Robinson and Duncan when they got there? Think that series might have turned out a little differently with Ewing's body to provide some resistance? I'm sure you don't think so.

There are other flaws in your "theory." Before the Lang-induced injury, Ewing had missed 20 games in the previous ten seasons. So what is your "theory" based on pre-1997-1998? Just want to discount that entire body of work when there clearly isn't a large enough sample to say whether the Knicks would've been better without him? (Ask Gerald Wilkins and Johnny Newman what they think.) And if your point is that post-injury Camby, Sprewell and Houston were more responsible for the Knicks' success than Patrick, well, that's debatable (we can go playoff game-by-playoff-game if you'd like at some point), but at this point you're also judging Ewing post-injury, in the twilight of his career.

As if I needed more evidence of your bias against all things orange and blue, how about your more recent column in which you lump Larry Johnson in with a bunch of former NBA superstars who (unlike Jason Kidd) didn't realize their limitations late in their careers? Ask Jeff Van Gundy about that. Or Knicks longtime NY Daily News beat writer Frank Isola. They'll both tell you that soon after LJ's back injury (and subsequent trade to the Knicks), he stopped pounding the dribble and forcing his awkward low post moves. He became adept at passing out of the double team and defending the post and on the perimeter.

There is more to say of course. I'm sure you'll have examples of games here or there where the Knicks thrived without the man who gave me most of my wonderful basketball memories. But real Knicks fans know that despite some of his high-profile failures, Patrick Ewing gave us a chance to win every night during our rather remarkable streak of 9 straight years to at least the second round of the playoffs (between Riley's '91-'92 squad until Van Gundy's conference finals loss in 2000).

This may sound like the bitter rantings of a long-suffering Knicks fan. And I may not know the NBA like you do. But I promise you this: I know the Knicks. Can we finally let this ridiculous notion go? Was Ewing one of the Top 10 players who ever lived? No. Of course not. But he was not responsible for the college hype that made people think he was headed in that direction. He was also damn good, played as hard as anyone ever has and adjusted his game in ways that nobody has ever given him credit for (check out the declining shots-attempted statistics that began when the Knicks brought in Houston, Johnson and Chris Childs in 1996).

You are unfairly representing a terrific player. So here's a challenge. Post my email. See what your readers think. This concept that has helped you achieve (pseudo) fame is bogus, at least as it pertains to the man whose name it bears. Quite simply, The Ewing Theory is a sham.

Yup, these are our readers.

We have internal guidelines designed to inform how we discuss the topic of sports media. These guidelines are important us, because they help maintain the credibility with which ESPN operates.

No one knows the guidelines better than Bill Simmons, and he customarily works within these standards. He also understands, as does everyone else at ESPN, that we regard these guidelines as being equally important when participating in social media.

While it's unfortunate — and sometimes painful — that not everyone outside of ESPN chooses to play by such rules, we choose to hold ourselves to higher standards. Regardless of the provocation, Bill's communication regarding WEEI fell short of those standards. So we've taken appropriate measures.

This shows ESPN employees that, even though the social media policy is still in its teething stage, this sets some clear guidelines that you cannot lash out at WEEI (an ESPN affiliate) even when provoked. This is also the same type of punishment parents give their teenage daughters for mouthing off at the dinner table.

Simmons has a much longer leash about stuff like this than many other Bristol employees who Tweet so that's why it's somewhat surprising that they enforced this meaningless little suspension upon him during the tail end of his book tour. He's banned for two weeks from Tweeting about...what exactly? The NBA? Fantasy football?

Anyway, apparently he's only allowed to Twitter about his book tour from here on out and the only stop left is his rescheduled Vegas one in early December. This is great news for the ESPN Zone in Las Vegas who will get tons of publicity as a result of this.

Bill Simmons Portland Book Tour [Oregon Live]

PHOTO: By The Beard Of Zeus

Daulerio will never admit this, and I probably shouldn't, but on January 23, 2003, we, along with fellow Black Table editor Eric Gillin, a Boston guy, stayed up to watch the debut of "The Jimmy Kimmel Show." We did this solely because Bill Simmons was a writer for the show. I'm not sure what we were expecting to see: Late-night talk shows aren't in the habit of giving guest appearances to lower-tier writers in their first episodes. (The show was a mess: This is back when they were openly drinking on set, and it was chaos. I think at one point, Kimmel tried to deep fat fry a ventriloquist dummy while "guest" Adam Corolla plaintively attempted to remind a piss-drunk Kimmel that "YOU ARE ON TELEVISION RIGHT NOW.") But it felt important somehow. A television show smart enough to hire Bill Simmons to write for them, well, that was something we couldn't miss. We felt like we knew him.

It's easy to forget this now, now that sports blogs are everywhere, now that Simmons is as much of an establishment figure as Chris Berman, now that the man produces his own television show, but back when he first came to ESPN, in 2001, he seemed like a revolutionary figure. I remember working in a doctor's office in May 2001 and reading his Is Roger Clemens the Antichrist? column. (I was not familiar with his Boston Sports Guy work.) I couldn't believe someone was getting away with this. Today, phrases like "kicked in the gonads," "this was the musical equivalent of U2 asking for a contract extension from their record company on the heels of "Zooropa" and "Pop")" and "looking like he was auditioning for the 'Chris Farley Story'" are familiar Simmons tropes: Everyone writes like that now. But not in 2001. In 2001, Skip Bayless was the "hip" columnist at Page 2. The other column I vividly remember from the period was Simmons' guide to the Atlanta Gold Club trial, which featured graphic descriptions of Patrick Ewing receiving oral sex from two women and this immortal aside:

During [Andruw] Jones's susbsequent testimony, the prosecutor asked which of the women Jones had sex with, and Jones answered, "Both of them," adding, "to tell you the truth, I wouldn't remember one of their faces right now." One of my personal favorite quotes from the trial.

What Simmons was doing was so different from what anyone else was doing that it didn't even seem to be the same medium. They were letting him do this? (Eventually, they would stop, somewhat: That Gold Club column got a solid scrubbing from ESPN back in 2007.) Other sportswriters hated Simmons immediately, ostensibly because of those tired Doesn't Sit In The Press Box arguments, but mostly because he was connecting with people, he was proving that the empty Verse Chorus Verse of the inverted pyramid and Fire The Manager! wasn't going to cut it anymore. Simmons was talking about sports the way people actually talked about sports. It's no wonder he was so disliked by the insiders and so embraced — tentatively at first, like a viral meme that spread, have you seen this guy? — by the masses. He gave hope for a lot of people — including, yeah, me, and Daulerio, and Gillin — that maybe the landscape for this shit, maybe it existed.

That turned, of course. It always does. Eventually the obsessives began carping — I think the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004 was when the minor Bill Simmons Is A Douche! movement began — and the mainstream folks, unable to deny his success any longer, began meeting him halfway, featuring him above everyone else on the site and encouraging their own writers to impersonate him. (That Rick Reilly sits next to Simmons on ESPN.com's front page today is wonderfully surreal: No one's reputation as Sports Wit suffered more from Simmons' ascendance than Reilly. He morphed from Jim Murray to Henny Youngman, seemingly in a matter of weeks.) Sports blogs blew up, including this one, sites that put the Establishment (whatever that was) in their crosshairs and started firing, ultimately blasting in every possible direction, no matter what got hit. Inevitably, Simmons would become a target. He was the biggest name — to us, anyway. But even in those attacks, sometimes justified, sometimes not, there was always a little bit held back. After all, everyone still read Simmons: No matter how many Karate Kid and Teen Wolf references there were, you still always read him. You still took him seriously, even if it were to trash him. Nobody does that with Jay Mariotti, or Bayless, or Reilly. (Honestly, when's the last time you seriously read anything by those guys?) They're easily dismissed. They've been mailing in their work for a decade. No one has ever accused Simmons of that.

A large part of Simmons' appeal has always been that sense that you knew him, that somehow you were invested in his success. Malcolm Gladwell and Chuck Klosterman will sell more books in their lifetime than Simmons, but people don't wait in lines spanning around the block just to have them sign their book like they do for Simmons. (A search for photos of Simmons brings up hundreds of shots of him posing with fans.) People want to know what his wife's like — type "Bill Simmons" into Google, and the second hit is "Bill Simmons wife," and the fourth is "Bill Simmons wife picture" — and what his kids are like and whether he's different in Los Angeles than he was in Boston. This is all absurd, of course. The guy types into a computer at a coffee shop all day. But it's what fans have always done with Simmons, even those who purport to hate him. Simmons turned into an indie rock band from the early '90s. "He's hanging out with Jimmy Kimmel and Matt Damon now? SELLOUT!" We treated Simmons like he was a guy from our neighborhood who made it big, like it was important that he remember the little people who got him there. In a way, he kind of was.

Now there he is, atop the New York Times Bestseller list, as establishment a pedestal as one can imagine. Simmons did something incredibly rare, particularly in our fractured, niche media world: He made the culture come to him. His triumph is his own, but, in a strange way, it feels like a victory for all of us. The sports culture needed changing, and Simmons is walking evidence that it can, and did. Somewhere out there, there's a college student with a viewpoint different than everyone else, and he/she will show up and change everything too, exposing Simmons (and the rest of us) the way he did to Reilly. That'll happen again. Thank heavens. Good ideas win out. Perseverance and new perspectives break through. The old rots and washes away. Sometimes the good guys win.

(Photo via this outstanding Flickr set.)

Originally, speculative rumors listed the number of emails from Simmonssupporters to the T'Wolves' executive department at 12,000. That's a high number, even for someone with the internet following of Sports Fella, when you consider how long it takes for a person to construct an email (even one as simple as SUBJECT: HIRE SIMMONS) and the fact that you'd be hard-pressed to find that many Timberwolves' fans who cared that much. Michael Rand, Minnesota's most intrepid (and trusted) pamphleteer of sports culture, originally reported the number as 12,000, but then heard from Wolves' public relations department that the number was more along the lines of 1,300. That's still a significant response, but probably not enough to ignite legitimate discussions among the higher-ups for it to actually happen. But there's still some clamoring about the number of pro-Simmons emails, apparently, as some "people" are convinced the number is actually higher than the 1,300 one T-Wolves' president Chris Wright claims he received. Why would he lie about something like that?

But here's who the T'Wolves have reportedly expressed genuine interest in for the position: Former Indiana GM David Kahn, Portland assistant GM Tom Penn, former Heat GM Randy Pfund. The T-Wolves' first choice, ESPN columnist Scoop Jackson, respectfully turned down the position early on.

T-Wolves' president Chris Wright has received 1,300 emails about Bill Simmons, but source says it's 15,000 [Randball]

I'm assuming the "mature subjects" broached will come in the form of occasional profanity, sexual innuendo, or the inclusion of male porn stars in fantasy basketball leagues. Or maybe he's going to push it a little further and he'll start churning out the podcast equivalent of the Robin Byrd show. The possibilities are endless!

Also, Cousin Sal added at the end of his segment that Simmons should "let everyone on Facebook know that everything is cool between you and your bosses."

So congratulations to the Bill Simmons for fighting the good fight to attain the type of creative freedom enjoyed by... pretty much everyone who doesn't work for ESPN.

UPDATE: It's not on ESPN.com yet — only in the iTunes store.