I love Bill Simmons' (espn.com) articles, and I'm sure many of my fellow internet basketball geeks here love him too. In his recent MVP article where he ranks the MVP candidates, he ranks Stephen Jackson at 69. and says

Gave us a little bit of everything: He had the best off-court incident (allegedly getting hit by a car outside of a strip joint, then firing gunshots in the air); he has a legal trial that starts May 10 and could coincide with the second round of the playoffs if Golden State upsets Dallas (not out of the question); he caused the fading Pacers to make one of the worst deals of the decade because they were so desperate to dump him; he turned his career around by embracing NellieBall, even giving point guard a whirl for a few games (now that was a sight); and if that's not enough, the fact that he's living in Oakland doubles as the most dangerous running subplot in sports right now that doesn't involve Pacman Jones. I haven't been this excited since Tupac got out of jail.

I especially loved him terming the trade "one of the worst deals of the decade."

He also comments on the trade in Part 1 of this article. He ranks Troy Murphy and Mike Dunleavy together at number 287 and says

The lesson, as always: Anytime you're considering a six-player NBA trade in which you end up with both overpaid white guys in the deal ... you might want to rethink that baby.

Just thought y'all would enjoy this. It'd be funny if Simmons' opinion starts to become the general consensus, because at first all the experts seemed to think Indiana won the trade (of course how were they supposed to know they never watch our games anyways...)

Simmons isn't paid to be an NBA expert; he is paid to be entertaining to sports fans, but he is obsessed with the NBA so he pretty much is an expert

FYI he ranks Baron #30 and US, The Fans, #1, for having to deal with this crappy tank-fested regular season (the regular season wasn't so crappy for some of us fans however :) ) He ranks Nash at #2 over Nowitski #3 based on the argument that if you replaced Nash with another random great pg, the team would've imploded because of the adversity they faced with stupid "alpha-dog" battles between Amare and Marion and Boris eating too many croissants in the offseason. But Nash kept them together. With Dirk, you could've replaced him with another random great pg and the team would've had a similar record. That's his argument anyways. I'd vote for Dirk just because their record is too good to ignore. But I don't like the MVP award or any award (MIP...) with such loose guidelines on how one should vote