Bill Simmons Wants to See Other People
Bill, we love you. This is an intervention. Please stop buying Clippers season tickets.
Bill, we need to talk.
I want you to know before we begin that everyone here loves you. Torsten loves you. House loves you. Russillo loves you. Kevin O’Connor loves turtlenecks, manscaping, and Killian Hayes. I love you — I’ve been reading you for more than twenty years. Your work is part of the reason 120 Proof Ball exists.
But Bill, you have a problem. You keep buying Clippers season tickets. Normally, I would say this is none of my business. Except you just emailed a breakup letter to the Clippers, which means you’ve finally arrived at the same conclusion the rest of us have been gently trying to lead you toward: You need to get out of this relationship.
A funny thing happened when I heard about your breakup letter: I realized you had broken up with my ex-girlfriend.
I Guess She Gets Around
I published my break up with the Los Angeles Clippers almost a year ago. I had suffered their season tickets for two decades, but by the fall of 2025, I had seen enough. The Clippers were asking 60% more money from me, for comparable seats at Intuit Dome. The roster was old. Kawhi Leonard’s knees had become a recurring plot device. The team had mortgaged most of its future, and Paul George was about to walk for nothing.
With all that going on, my girlfriend is asking for a Bentley? I wrote the breakup letter:
Sweetie, we’ve had some wonderful years together. We’ve had some terrible years together. Mostly terrible, if we’re being honest. But I love you, and I think it’s time we saw other people.
Then, a year later Bill published his. At first I thought: SON OF A BITCH.
The guy whose Page 2 writing helped inspire the original version of this website had somehow arrived at the same premise after us. Somewhere, a circle had closed. The student had become the master. The master was stealing the student’s homework. Lawsuits were discussed, mostly by my wife.
But then I read Bill’s letter and realized the articles weren’t actually the same. I had written a divorce letter. Bill was disputing the charge with Visa.
His argument was essentially that he and his longtime ticket partner, filmmaker Mike Tollin, had signed a five-year agreement for seats at Intuit Dome, and circumstances had changed so dramatically that they should be released from the remaining commitment. That’s fair.
But it does raise one uncomfortable question, and Bill, this is the part of the intervention where I need you to listen without interrupting: What the hell took you so long?
I Know Because I Did It Too
I should disclose a conflict of interest. I caught the same disease. I grew up in Chicago as a Bulls fan and moved to Los Angeles as a teen with “Beat L.A.” pre-installed. Becoming a Lakers fan wasn’t an option, but I loved basketball and wanted to see NBA games. So my first Clippers tickets were really Bulls tickets. I’d buy seats when Chicago came to Staples Center, root for the visitors, and go home.
Then I started noticing the other guys. Elton Brand was an absolute workhorse. Corey Maggette spent entire evenings putting his head down and driving toward the basket like he’d just learned the rim was tax-deductible. Sam Cassell looked approximately 63 years old and could still hit a midrange jumper whenever he damn well pleased. They were young, they worked hard, and they weren’t threatening anybody’s trophy case.
And I thought: Why not? The Bulls are my team. These guys can be my second team. My lovable fuckup little brother. Who’s going to root against the Clippers? Come on. They’ve never won anything. Wouldn’t it be fun to be there when they finally did?
It took me several years to understand why everyone laughs at them. The Clippers aren’t merely unlucky. They participate enthusiastically in their own suffering. I spent my twenties believing the franchise was cursed. It took me until middle age to realize the call was coming from inside the house.
But we’ll come back to that, because this intervention isn’t about me. Bill, this is about you. And unfortunately, we brought receipts.
Bill, We’ve Brought Some Things You Wrote
Nobody wants to embarrass you here. But part of an intervention is confronting someone we love with his own behavior. So we’ve brought some things.
Let’s start in 2004, when you first wrote about becoming a Clippers season-ticket holder. You had just watched the Patriots and Red Sox win championships and apparently decided there wasn’t enough pain in your life, so you adopted the most reliable pain-delivery system in professional basketball. Okay. Fine. We all make mistakes when we’re young. The problem is that you immediately figured out it was a mistake.
By April 2006, the Clippers were actually good. Elton Brand was having a monster year. They were headed to the playoffs. And you wrote an entire column trying to understand what had happened to you. You explained that you were still a Celtics fan. You had originally bought Clippers tickets partly because they were an affordable way to watch the rest of the NBA. But now, against your better judgment, you had developed feelings.
Worse, Bill, you already understood the relationship. You compared the Clippers to the hot, crazy person you know you shouldn’t date but somehow can’t resist. You talked about wanting to stop renewing. You talked about regretting the money you’d sent them. At one point you described buying Clippers tickets as “feeding the beast.”
Bill. That was 2006. George W. Bush was president. The first iPhone didn’t exist. Kevin Durant was still at Texas. And you had already diagnosed the disease. Then you kept feeding the beast for another twenty years. We’re not judging you. That’s not what interventions are for. House, stop laughing.
By 2010, your tickets arrived for Year 7, and you had another breakthrough. You wrote that you’d always made fun of the suckers who kept sending the Clippers money while insisting they only owned the tickets because they wanted to see the other teams. And then you realized something. You were one of the suckers. Bill, this is usually the point in the intervention where we would congratulate you for your self-awareness. Except you renewed. Again. And again. And again.
To be fair, something dangerous happened next. The Clippers got good. Chris Paul arrived. Blake Griffin was jumping over Kias. DeAndre Jordan was trying to put people into early retirement. Lob City became appointment television. For the first time in our lives, Clippers fans got to experience the most dangerous substance known to mediocre sports franchises: Hope.
You bought in. I bought in. Everybody bought in. And this matters, because nobody in this room is claiming every Clippers renewal was irrational. There were stretches where the tickets were awesome. That’s how they get you — the casino doesn’t give you a free drink because they’re worried you’re thirsty.
By 2017, though, you were conducting the autopsy. You looked back at the Chris Paul era as one of basketball’s great what-ifs and contemplated the possibility that the Clippers were about to become the Clippers again: dysfunction, declining ticket prices, irrelevance, lottery picks. Two months later, you published an 11-step plan to save the franchise. Your advice to Steve Ballmer was basically to blow it up. But there’s one part we really need to discuss. Bill, in that piece you compared the proposed Inglewood arena to trying to save a failing relationship by having a baby. Again, I’m going to give you a second with that one.
In 2017, you said building the arena that would eventually become Intuit Dome was like having a child to save a dying relationship. Seven years later, you signed a five-year commitment to live with the kid. Bill. Look at me. Do you see why everybody came over today?
Nobody Writes a Breakup Letter to a Movie Theater
Then Kawhi Leonard and Paul George arrived, and I am not going to criticize you for believing because I believed too. Kawhi had just won a championship in Toronto. Paul George was coming off an MVP-caliber season. Suddenly the Clippers had two elite wings, an owner willing to spend, a deep roster and legitimate championship aspirations.
You picked them to reach the Finals. Fine. Lots of smart basketball people believed in that team. But this is where we need to talk about something else you’ve been saying for years. You keep explaining that Clippers season tickets were largely a way to see everybody else. And maybe that’s emotionally true. Maybe.
But Bill, if you’re not rooting for the Clippers at least a little bit, why are you picking them to win the title? If they’re just the local movie theater where you happen to watch NBA basketball, why are you checking whether Kawhi Leonard is playing before deciding whether to drive down there?
Why does Denver ripping their heart out in the Bubble warrant a podcast called A Total Clipocalypse? Why, two years later, are you releasing another episode called The Clippers Curse Vol. 47? Why are you this mad? Why do you keep threatening to leave? And twenty years later, why are you writing them a breakup letter? Nobody writes a breakup letter to a movie theater.
Bill, I used to tell myself the same thing. They’re not my team. I’m a Bulls fan. I’m just going to the games. I just like Brand. I just like Blake. I just want to see Chris Paul. I just want to see Kawhi. That’s how second teams happen. Nobody proposes. They just keep leaving a toothbrush at your place. One morning you wake up and half the closet is full.
Bill, Look at the Title of Your Own Podcast
Then we get to 2023. The Clippers trade for James Harden, and you respond by recording an episode titled: The Clippers Are Dumb. Not Let’s See How This Develops. Not An Intriguing Gamble for Los Angeles. Not Maybe Four Aging Ball-Dominant Stars Can Figure This Out. The Clippers Are Dumb.
You called the move “peak Clipper,” questioned the wisdom of assembling four aging stars and explained why you didn’t believe this was a championship team. Bill, I’m going to ask Russillo to hand you something. That’s right. It’s the five-year Intuit Dome agreement you signed afterward.
Take your time. Nobody’s rushing you. After Sterling. After Lob City. After Houston. After Denver. After Kawhi’s knees. After Paul George’s injuries. After Harden. After twenty years of columns and podcasts in which one of America’s most successful basketball commentators repeatedly explained exactly why buying Clippers season tickets was hazardous to your emotional and financial health. After a podcast literally called The Clippers Are Dumb.
Five years. Bill, you spent twenty years trying to tell yourself something. We’re just asking you to listen.
I Finally Did
This is the part where I have to tell you why I’m sitting on this side of the intervention. By 2024, I was done.
The Clippers wanted me to pay roughly 60 percent more to move comparable seats from Staples Center to Intuit Dome. This was not an especially compelling sales pitch.
Baby, we’d already spent everything we had. We had mortgaged our future for Kawhi and PG. We had spent years trying to build a life together on an IKEA table with four bad legs. The roster was old. The knees weren’t getting younger. The draft assets we’d shipped away weren’t coming home.
Then Paul George walked for nothing. Now you want 60 percent more? Honey, I was happy to help put you through medical school. But now you want to drive a Bentley while you do it?
No. I let the tickets go. Then I did something I’d barely done in twenty years. I stopped watching. And it was wonderful. The Clippers eventually did what the Clippers do, and for once I didn’t have to experience every pothole personally. Turns out peace of mind costs less than season tickets.
Then, later, came the Aspiration allegations. I didn’t know Steve Ballmer had broken any rules, and neither did anybody outside the investigation. But I didn’t need to know.
I manage money for a living. I’m accustomed to looking at a range of possible outcomes instead of insisting the future must conform to whichever one I prefer. So take the favorable scenario: the Clippers are cleared. Fine. What do I own? An aging team with limited draft capital, questionable knees and a championship window that already looks like somebody is lowering it onto our fingers.
Now take the bad scenario. The allegations are substantiated and serious penalties land on a franchise already desperate for youth and draft assets. I didn’t need to predict which one would happen. I just needed to weight them. I wasn’t predicting guilt. I was marking the Clippers to market. And the expected value sucked. So I stayed out.
Bill, I’m not telling you this because I was smarter than you. I’m telling you because eventually somebody has to stop feeding the beast.
You’ve Had The Answer since The Answer was MVP
There’s another reason I’m having trouble accepting your excuses, Bill. You’re Bill Simmons.
I had Clippers season tickets because I wanted to see NBA games. That was the system. I gave them money, they gave me tickets, and every few weeks Nikola Jokic or Steph Curry showed up.
But you have spent the last thirty years becoming one of the most connected people in basketball. You know GMs. You know owners. You know agents. You know players. You know half the media. You employ the other half. Your phone contains enough NBA contacts to start a rival league.
If I decide at four o’clock that I want to see Celtics-Lakers that night, I open StubHub and begin negotiating against my family’s inheritance. If you decide at four o’clock that you want to see Celtics-Lakers, you start scrolling through your contacts.
There is no basketball experience in America for which Bill Simmons needs a five-year Clippers contract. Want to see Jokic? Go see Jokic for a beer. Want to spend a weekend in Oklahoma City watching SGA? I’m reasonably certain Sam Presti will take your call. Want to watch the Celtics? You have approximately four thousand friends in Boston, several of whom probably own buildings. You could spend the entire NBA season bouncing from great game to great game like the world’s most overqualified Deadhead.
Instead, you signed a five-year contract with the Clippers. Which tells me this was never really about access. It was about Los Angeles. More specifically, it was about the one perfectly good NBA team playing in Los Angeles whose tickets you could never allow yourself to buy. Because I think you could survive the money. You could survive the traffic. You could survive sitting next to Lakers fans.
What you could not survive was a Laker diehard recognizing you in the concourse, smiling, and saying: “Bill! Knew you’d come around eventually.”
That’s the whole disease. You spent twenty years in a dysfunctional relationship with the Clippers to avoid one asshole in a Kobe jersey feeling smug for eleven seconds. And Bill? I completely understand. Because that’s pretty much why I ended up with them too.
We Have Prepared a Treatment Plan
At this point I think we all understand why you stayed. Ultimately, neither of us was comfortable with the phrase, “My Lakers tickets.” The Clippers solved that problem for us. They were the loophole. And I think we can safely walk right up to the border of good taste here, plant a little flag and go no farther:
The Clippers were Bill Simmons’ Lakers-virginity loophole.
I understand. But Bill, you had options. You have money. You could have bought a second place in Boston and spent half the basketball season there. You could have:
Created an annual NBA tour, picked ten great teams, invented reasons to visit every city and mysteriously scheduled your book promotion engagements for the afternoon before Thunder-Nuggets.
Adopted Golden State as a tolerable Western Conference side piece. Steph Curry is delightful. Nobody would have blamed you.
Taken the Clippers season-ticket budget and bought incredible seats to twenty genuinely interesting NBA games every year.
Bought Lakers tickets only when teams you actually wanted to see came to town. They’re not Lakers tickets. They’re Celtics-at-Lakers tickets. They’re Nuggets-at-Lakers tickets. They’re “I paid $1,100 to watch Giannis and unfortunately the NBA required Lakers participation” tickets.
You could simply use the secondary market at 5 p.m. like a functioning adult.
Unfortunately, we recognize the flaw in all of these treatment options. Eventually somebody sees you. One photograph hits the internet: Bill Simmons. Crypto.com Arena. Lakers home game. Then it starts:
“Hey Bill! Great seats!”
“Thanks.”
“Good to see you finally came around!”
“I DIDN’T COME AROUND.”
“Sure, Bill. See you Tuesday.”
No. We understand why that’s unacceptable. Which is why everyone here has agreed on a different treatment plan. Russillo, bring in the box.
Hiding In Plain Sight
Bill, open the box. That’s right. It’s a professional full-size Chewbacca costume. Stay with me. Underneath that is a Dwight Howard Lakers jersey. Not Kobe. Too reverent. Not LeBron. Too obvious. Dwight Howard.
You purchase excellent Lakers seats under an LLC. You arrive in character. You do not speak, other than the occasional growl. Chewblocka is born. Bill Simmons remains a lifelong Boston Celtics fan. Chewblocka is an entirely separate legal entity who happens to enjoy Lakers basketball. This distinction is important.
Chewblocka can cheer for Luka. Chewblocka can get excited during a fourth-quarter run. Chewblocka can scream at a bad rotation. Chewblocka can appear on the Jumbotron. Within six months, Chewblocka becomes a beloved Lakers cryptid. Kids want pictures, Spike Lee simps for an autograph. The broadcast finds him after big shots.
Meanwhile Bill Simmons is home. Theoretically. Nobody knows.
It’s a perfect costume. Bill, in an unprovoked drive-by, you called Chewie the “most overrated sidekick ever.” And Dwight? You summed him up, “alpha-dog pedigree, sidekick mindset.”
There is one complication: you normally have two seats. We’ve solved that too. Russillo takes the other one. His assignment is to look just disinterested enough that nobody suspects anything. Not too disinterested. That attracts attention. Just a man attending a basketball game next to a seven-foot Wookiee in a Dwight Howard jersey who sees absolutely nothing unusual about the arrangement.
Eventually somebody asks about Chewblocka on the podcast.
“Have you seen that Wookiee guy at Lakers games?”
You don’t flinch, “Yeah, I’ve heard about him. Seems annoying.”
Perfect.
Bill, Everybody in This Room Loves You
Here’s the problem with making too much fun of Bill Simmons for any of this: I understand him. Of course I do.
I took almost exactly the same road. His Celtics were my Bulls. His refusal to embrace the Lakers was my refusal to embrace the Lakers. His Clippers tickets were my Clippers tickets. We both found a weird little basketball halfway house where we could live in Los Angeles, see the best players in the world and preserve allegiance to the teams we’d loved since childhood. Then something else happened. We developed feelings for the halfway house.
That’s why the bad years mattered. That’s why the collapses hurt. That’s why Kawhi’s knees mattered. That’s why Bill checked whether Kawhi was playing before deciding whether to go. That’s why I bought a Vladimir Radmanović jersey approximately fifteen minutes before he left for the Lakers.
That’s why I wrote my breakup letter. And it’s why Bill finally wrote his.
I grew up reading Simmons. Page 2 was part of the DNA that made me want to write sports this way in the first place. So the funny thing isn’t that I figured out the Clippers before he did. The funny thing is that he figured them out before either of us did.
Bill had the diagnosis in 2006. He knew the relationship was unhealthy. He knew he was becoming attached. He knew sending them money was feeding the beast. He knew the rationalization about seeing the other teams. By 2010, he even realized he’d become one of the suckers he used to make fun of. And then he spent another sixteen years proving himself right.
So Bill, everybody in this room loves you. But we can’t keep watching you do this to yourself. You don’t need a refund. You need a Dwight Howard jersey and a Wookiee costume.
Bill. Put on the suit. Chewblocka awaits.
SPORTSWRITING WITH RECKLESS INTEGRITY
If you made it this far, you already know what we do here. We write about greatness and delusion, triumph and collapse, and the strange emotional hold sports keeps on people who should probably know better.
Drop your email and once a week we’ll serve you something from the top shelf — no cheap shots.
Todd
120 Proof Ball
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