The New York Times

“Baseball has its numbers and football has its hard hits, but basketball, more than those sports, has style. And no one has done more to try to capture that than the collection of bloggers known as Freedarko."
Full Interview

Sports Illustrated

“To say that they've written one of the most enlightening books on the game's evolution (which they have) is to miss the point. The books isn't intended solely to educate; it's also meant to entertain, and to that end it suceeds wildly."
Full Review — Page Scan

The New Yorker

"'The Undisputed Guide' brings this kind of endearing obsessiveness to bear on the history of the game, from the barnstorming era to the ultmate formation of a single league, and to the personalities that range from Mikan to Magic to Shaq."
Full Review

New York Magazine

"FreeDarko isn't standing outside the mainstream of basketball discussion: It's driving it ... This is a history of basketball told straight, but smartly, with wit and detail and undeniable affection....Any NBA fan can read this: It's not for grad students and stoners and revisionists; it's for everyone ... We are now living in a FreeDarko world. Hail, hail."
Full Review

The Run of Play

"This is a history of basketball written with a degree of conceptual complexity that’s just about unique in the canon of the sport. But it’s also an inviting, accessible narrative that doesn’t have to be praised in terms of baroque sociology... It’s also, and by some distance, the prettiest sports book I’ve ever seen... It’s like a McSweeney’s you don’t have to pet."
Full Review

The Portland Mercury

"The book is an essential guide to the NBA as seen through the eyes of brilliant outsiders—writers, statisticians, and illustrators—unwilling to describe the contents of the game in the typical language of the sports section. If you are watching basketball without the guidance of FreeDarko, you are simply doing it wrong."
Full Review

Maxim

“A highly graphic look at both well-and lesser-known moments in the pro game’s past, written by the sport’s most entertaining bloggers. Get infotained with illustrated awesomeness.”

Deadspin: "The Invention of Air: The Myths of Young Michael Jordan, Deconstructed"

GQ: "That's Terrible: The Wit and Wisdom of Bill Walton"

ESPN The Magazine: "Stop/Watch"

Jew-ish.com: "Interview with FreeDarko's Bethlehem Shoals"

Praise for our first book, The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac

The New York Times

A textual-visual showpiece... Fabulously eccentric and gloriously illustrated... It is likely the only sports almanac in existence that features a manifesto, cooks up winkingly abstruse statistics like “cancer effect” (e.g. Stephon Marbury and the Knicks), provides an etymology of the hoop slang “swag,” and name-drops Amiri Baraka, Martin Buber and Chris “Birdman” Andersen. The book knows its hoops too... Phenomenal swag."

Sports Illustrated

Ever wonder what would happen if Bill James and Mars Blackmon got together? Produced by the writers of the hoops blog FreeDarko, the illustrated Almanac combines player analysis with witty cultural commentary (whose jersey should you wear to a wedding?). Welcome to the 21st-century NBA, where style counts as much as stats.

True Hoop, ESPN.com

The book is an academic survey that elevates pro basketball's pop to poetry. The prose is intentionally esoteric and will be a deal breaker for some—but a revelation for others. For junkies who revel in taxonomies, the mythical classifications are a thing of beauty. Those who embrace the more cerebral elements of the pro game, the symbol-rich FreeDarko Style Guide will delight. And for those who love the transmission of big ideas through graphic art, the illustrations are eye candy."

Slate

"FreeDarko is the Web's leading destination for the obsessive, overliterate, free-thinking NBA fan. The basketball collective's new print extravaganza, The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, mines all of FreeDarko's obsessions. There are incisive profiles of players, from LeBron James to Leandro Barbosa; unique statistics (the dunk-to-layup ratio among NBA big men); and—perhaps the book's most startling innovation—the Periodic Table of Style."