If you are reading this, you are either a friend of mine, a person who read about this blog in one of my postings somewhere else, or someone who simply got lost while navigating your way around the internet. Whatever it is that brings you, welcome.
I have been watching hoops for as long as I can remember, and I used to play hoops for my high school team (read: I sat on the bench for my high school team). I was a ‘tweener – I couldn’t dribble well enough to play point guard, and I didn’t score enough to play shooting guard. Some folks label players like that “scrubs,” but I prefer to think of myself as a ‘tweener (I’ll have a posting soon about the distinction between “scrubs” and ‘tweeners). Anyway, during all of the time I spent watching hoops – whether from my couch watching it on tv, or from my seat on the bench watching my teammates live – I learned lots about the game. And I have lots of opinions. I have spent many hours during my life talking hoops with my friends. Recently, a bunch of them started telling me that I should start a blog. I’m not sure whether they were giving me genuine advice or just trying to help me find a new audience so they don’t have to listen to me anymore. Regardless, they got me thinking about starting a blog, and, well, here it is.
Before I get started, I just want to set a few ground rules. First, don’t be offensive. I’m not here to censor people, and I don’t care about little things like cursing. Let’s all just try to keep the conversation respectful and relatively clean. If you think that someone’s comment is stupid, either ignore it or refute it, but don’t tell him that he’s a #!@’ing bag of #%$ whose mother is a *^%.
Second, respect the anonymity of people who post on the site. There are a few reasons for this:
ONE: The purpose of this site is to share opinions about basketball players, primarily professional basketball players. Every single player on an NBA roster could crumple me up into the shape of a basketball, and, using that basketball-shaped-human-that-used-to-be-me, shoot more than 70% from the foul line (except Shaq, but his problem would not be during the “crumpling me up into the shape of a basketball” phase of that activity). I’ll sleep a bit better at night if those players don’t know my name.
TWO: I have millions of female fans around the world. Millions. I have to go to great lengths to keep my contact information secretive; otherwise I would get hundreds of e-mails, phone calls, and personal visits every day. If those millions of females knew that they could find me here, they would crash the site. I don’t feel like paying for more bandwidth, so please just refer to me by my screen-name.
THREE: I feel quite strongly that people should not be judged based on a google search for their name. It’s one of those many opinions I have. If a stranger ever google searches for my name, I don’t want him to think he knows me because he spent five minutes reading what comes up. I certainly don’t want him to think he knows me because he read some postings I made on my blog.
Other rules may need to be implemented over time, but, for now, the only rules are not to be offensive, and to respect the anonymity of people who post. Basically, this is designed to be a site where hoops fans can go to stay current on current hoopenings (hoop happenings, for those who didn’t catch on), and to jump into a conversation having something to do with hoops. The site has links to sites that cover hoops news, links to sites that sell hoops gear, and links to other blogs about hoops. I’ll try to inject some humor into the posts on the site, but, at bottom, the posts will be designed to start conversations about hoops. (If you’re looking for a more even balance between hoops and comedy, I suggest that you watch the Knicks. Oh… speaking of the Knicks and comedy… If you want to laugh, watch this video and remember that the Knicks drafted the guy “guarding” Vince Carter.)
Welcome to my site. I hope you visit often, and jump into the conversation.