Bill Simmons has written a long and tortured criticism (rebuttal?) of Seth Wickersham’s meticulously reported story about the Patriots’ ongoing behind-the-scenes drama. If you want to spend the next 10-14 minutes making the Nick Young face, go ahead and read it. But if you just want to know how crazy it is, this is the only paragraph you need:
One week later, it’s hard to decipher what was definitely true, exaggerated or outright wrong in Wickersham’s piece because, unlike with peak Halberstam, it wastes too much time on nonessential stuff, like the opening Brady-gets-pissed-off anecdote (that happens every year, by the way), or Brady’s complicated relationship with trainer/shaman Alex Guerrero. Wickersham’s biggest scoop: Apparently, Bob Kraft ordered Bill Belichick to trade Jimmy Garoppolo. Hmmmmmmm. Over the past 17 years, the Patriots owner never intervened on anything related to personnel, big, medium or small. At age 76, after five Super Bowls, Kraft suddenly started ordering the NFL’s greatest organizational asset around? Really?
Here are the arguments being laid out in that paragraph:
- Wickersham’s reporting isn’t trustworthy because it doesn’t do a good enough job of reminding Bill Simmons of David Halberstam’s reporting.
- Pieces of reporting that were clearly central to Wickersham’s story were not actually important.
- Bill Simmons doesn’t think Bob Kraft would have done something that Wickersham reported him to have done, therefore he didn’t do it.
But wait, maybe Simmons has some of his own scoops to undermine Wickersham’s extremely thorough reporting:
I know someone who spent time with Kraft last weekend; Kraft was more dumbfounded by the story than anything.
Man...
Go to hell.