…when I read a Bill Simmons mailbag.

Anyway, there was a really funny moment Thursday that could have only happened at a Lakers game. Near the end of a third-quarter timeout, the camera caught Val Kilmer and three of his chins on the JumboTron, punctuating the moment by playing “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins. You know, a “Top Gun” homage. He took a second or two to get the joke, then unleashed one of those “Very funny, you got me, just know that I’m on a lot of meds right now” smiles. And this would have been enjoyable on its own, but they cut to someone else in the stands. …

That’s right. …

Tom Cruise!

He caught on a little quicker and did the Tom Cruise Over-Laugh. And this would have been great on its own, but the Lakers pushed it to another level: They went split-screen with Kilmer and Cruise with “Danger Zone” still blasting. As far as I was concerned, this was the most emotional reunion in Lakers history. Cruise kept laughing; Kilmer looked mildly perturbed. (After all, he’s an actor, dammit! That was 23 years ago! He’s made a lot of movies since then!) At this point, I was praying they’d cut to Anthony Edwards in Section 312 but he wasn’t there.

Ha! Great one about Anthony Edwards sitting in the upper level.

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Last year, when the Bucks had a GM opening, Bill Simmons started a campaign to fill the position. Fortunately, the Bucks hired John Hammond.

Fast forward a year, and Simmons is campaigning for the open Minnesota GM job, punctuated by this beauty in his so-called “epic” conversation with author Malcom Gladwell (the guy who thinks all underdogs should utilize the full-court press).

NBA teams rarely, if ever, think outside the box, and that’s one of at least 50 reasons why I could succeed as a GM.

This started out as a semi-joke, but I think over the course of the last year, Simmons’ ego, along with a few thousand emails of support from his readers, have convinced himself that he’s actually qualified to run an NBA franchise.

Look around the league and you’ll find that NBA general managers are usually former players, had front-office experience prior to getting the keys to a franchise, have advanced degrees in business and have an deep understanding of the salary cap and of how the fiscal side of the NBA works. Bill’s greatest strength is his ability to compare an athlete to a character to some random movie from the ’80s. What’s he going to do — sit Kevin Love down and tell him that his game reminds him of Chubby from “Teen Wolf”? How does this get the T-Wolves to the playoffs?

To me, the big question is whether or not Simmons keeps this up. Is he going to campaign for every open general manager position until he gets one (or more likely, dies of old age)? Or is there a certain point when all this I-can-run-an-NBA-team talk becomes so sad that he eventually just gives it up?

There’s no doubt about it — Simmons is an entertaining sportswriter, maybe the best in the stream-of-consciousness/pop-culture business. But he needs a reality check, and there’s no way to give it to him.

Predictably, Bill Simmons was not happy about which team was on the losing end of the brilliant, triple-overtime Game 6 of the Boston/Chicago series, but that didn’t stop him from writing an eloquent column about how the series represents everything we look for as sports fans.

We love sports for the simple reason that we never know when this will happen. It rarely does. We watch a lot of crummy games. We watch sporting events that had potential to be great and weren’t. We watch sporting events that almost made it, but one dumb thing happened to screw it up: A foul at the wrong time, a penalty, a two-base error, whatever. We keep watching. We keep hoping. And when everything clicks, it’s blissful. I am hearing from people who haven’t e-mailed me in years. Readers are sending me 700-word e-mails. The thing that keeps jumping out: Even fans without rooting interests have gotten swept up in this series. How can you not?

Think of all the crap we deal with as fans. “Bulls-Celtics 2009” explains why we put up with every story about Clemens and Bonds and Michael Vick and Terrell Owens and everyone else who conspires to make sports less fun. On the same day of Game 6, a story broke that Alex Rodriguez was allegedly seen with human growth hormone. The story was digested and consumed in the same predictably brief cycle: Mainstream Web sites and blogs and message boards and sports radio first, then “PTI” and “Around the Horn,” then “SportsCenter,” then newspapers and magazines. You can either throw yourself into that cycle or look the other way. I am getting older. I just want to watch sports. I have trained myself to look the other way. This stuff clutters my brain, and not in a good way. I just want to watch sports. I just want to watch sports.

This is the best first round series I’ve ever seen. As a Bucks fan, I’m supposed to hate all Chicago teams, but I can’t help but root for these young Bulls. My only worry is that there has been such an emotional buildup in this series that Game 7 can’t possibly live up to expectations. The worst thing that could happen would be for one team to come out and lay an egg.

One point that Bill Simmons made in his “woe is me” column about how the Celtics will be without KG in the playoffs was how the truth about Garnett’s injury didn’t come out until the franchise let it out.

There’s a hidden sub-story lurking here: It involves the fall of newspapers, lack of access and the future of reporting, not just with sports but with everything. I grew up reading Bob Ryan, who covered the Celtics for the Boston Globe and remains the best basketball writer alive to this day. Back in the 1970s and early ’80s, he was overqualified to cover the team. In 1980, he would have sniffed out the B.S. signs of this KG story, kept pursuing it, kept writing about it, kept working connections and eventually broken it. True, today’s reporters don’t get the same access Ryan had, but let’s face it: If 1980 Bob Ryan was covering the Celtics right now, ESPN or someone else would lure him away. And that goes for the editors, too. The last two sports editors during the glory years of the Globe’s sports section were Vince Doria and Don Skwar … both of whom currently work for ESPN.

For the past few years, as newspapers got slowly crushed by myriad factors, a phalanx of top writers and editors fled for the greener pastures of the Internet. The quality of nearly every paper suffered, as did morale. Just two weeks ago, reports surfaced that the New York Times Company (which owns the Globe) was demanding $20 million in union concessions or it’d shut down the Globe completely. I grew up dreaming of writing a sports column for the Globe; now the paper might be gone before I turn 40. It’s inconceivable. But this Garnett story, and how it was (and wasn’t) covered, reminds me of “The Wire,” which laid out a blueprint in Season 5 for the death of newspapers without us fully realizing it. The season revolved around the Baltimore Sun and its inability (because of budget cuts and an inexperienced staff) to cover the city’s decaying infrastructure. The lesson was inherent: We need to start caring about the decline of newspapers, because, really, all hell is going to break loose if we don’t have reporters breaking stories, sniffing out corruption, seeing through smoke and mirrors and everything else. That was how Season 5 played out, and that’s why “Wire” creator David Simon is a genius. He saw everything coming before anyone else did.

Ultimately, Garnett’s injury doesn’t REALLY matter. It’s just sports. But I find it a little chilling that the best player on the defending NBA champion could be sidelined for two solid months, with something obviously wrong, and nobody came close to unraveling the real story. We still don’t know what’s wrong with his knee. We just know it’s screwed up. And, yeah, you could say that Garnett has always been guarded — with just a few people in his circle of trust — and yeah, you could say that only a few members of the Celtics organization know the truth (maybe coach Doc Rivers, GM Danny Ainge, majority owner Wyc Grousbeck, the trainers and that’s it). But this was a massive local sports story. Its coverage is not a good sign for the future of sports journalism or newspapers in general.

It’s a good point, and one that has been made before (without the references to “The Wire” — Bill’s specialty). With the death of the newspaper, there won’t be 5-10 hungry reporters sitting in a press room at the Boston Herald waiting to dig into a story. Most reporting is done from a distance these days, and even those with “access,” don’t have that much access. What’s lost here is that franchises are more guarded about information than they’ve ever been, because they’ve been burned by the Bob Ryans of the world before. Ryan was/is just doing his job, and doing it well, but there is little to no incentive for teams to be up front about injury information. For this, we have Bill Belicheat to thank.

Predictably, Simmons was crushed to learn that Kevin Garnett will be unable to play early on in the playoffs. His editor asked him for an immediate reaction.

The best thing about being a sports fan on the West Coast: Every game comes on three hours earlier. I watched a 12-inning Boston-Oakland game Tuesday night that ended at the totally reasonable time of 11:29 p.m. Had I stayed up for that one on the East Coast, I would have been dead for work the next day, Oh, wait, I don’t have a real job. Bad example. But you get the idea.

The worst thing about being a sports fan on the West Coast: Things happen while you’re sleeping. I never know what to expect upon first glance at my Blackberry. Today, I woke up at 7:10 in the morning, trekked downstairs, let my dog outside, ground some coffee beans, filled the filter, added the water, got the brewing process going, and then, even as I was still wiping the crust from my eyes, these three e-mails were atop my inbox…

It’s interesting to read his stuff on a shortened timeline. (He says he had only 150 minutes to write the piece.) Is it as funny or as good as his usual columns? You be the judge.