Here's my analysis of his article.
It begins with a blitzkrieg of amazing Olympic events that Simmons has recently experienced in London. He basically lists off events and Olympic personalities with a series of sentences that all start the same way: "I spent the ...", "I knocked Wimbledon ...", "I caught a ...", "I watched the ...", "I devoured more ...", "I lived vicariously ...", and "I saw five ...". The good thing about this technique is that readers can understand the article perfectly, even if they zone-out while reading any of these example sentences.
The article then says it will be a mail-bag article, and so we expect to see a series of questions from readers followed by replies from the sports guy. However, the mail-bag is only two questions long and is basically used to introduce the recent Dwight Howard mega-trade. As further proof that this is not a true mail bag article, Simmons does not end the article as he usually does - with a particularly outlandish question from a reader followed by the reply, "Yup, these are my readers".
The article is mostly a series of judgments on who is a "Winner" and "Loser" in the trade. Simmons makes his judgement explicit by starting each section with a heading like "Winner: The Lakers" or "Loser: Orlando". Starting each section with the same format has the same effect as starting each sentence in the the first paragraph in the same style: namely, readers can jump around the article and read or skip what they like.
I always wondered how he digests a sporting event and publishes an article so quickly. After a bit of analysis, I can see that Simmons uses defined sentence patterns and article sectioning to quickly introduce a range of topics or examples. He often assumes that the user is aware of the event that he is writing about (a fair assumption) and thus wastes little effort in providing background and instead focuses on his reaction to the event.
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