About Me
Basketball Links
About The Blog
This blog is about basketball. Clear enough?
Okay, a little more detail. I have been a fan of the game for more than twenty years. I did not grow up a basketball fan, however. Growing up in Canada, when I did, there was not a lot of exposure to basketball. Games weren’t televised very often, and when they were, you had to know where to find them. Since I didn’t care, I didn’t find them. (And no, I wasn’t a hockey fan, either)
Sometime in highschool, my attitude towards basketball changed. And I soaked up as much information about it as I could. I watched every game on television (still not a lot, at that time), bought the Complete Book of Pro Basketball by Zander Hollander every year, until they stopped printing them after 1998- a very sad day, then changed to the Basketball Almanac, published by Signet. I studied the scouting reports and poured over the stats. I could tell you tell you the strengths and weaknesses of Sacramento’s 12th man back when Sacramento was a lottery mainstay. Kind of like they are now, in fact. Now, keep in mind, that much of this was before the internet made finding out stats something a 6 year old can do with a couple of clicks of a mouse. I lived in Australia for a year and still remember Tuesdays being a very special day because the USA Today printed the complete stats for every single team every Tuesday in their International Edition (hey, the USA Today is good for something, at least!). I certainly wasn’t going to let living abroad deprive me of NBA fix.
I became an expert on the NBA, at least in my own mind. I even wrote a weekly column for a while at Hoopsworld.com, or one of it’s earlier incarnations. I was even hired at EA Sports, in part, for my basketball knowledge. Both my family and I were pleased to find out that it was good for something.
As for the blog itself, it provides a bit of an outlet for me to spout my opinions on basketball and pretend that someone is actually reading them. As I am Canadian, I am a Raptors fan first and foremost, but pride myself on being fairly knowledgable and subjective on all the teams around the league. I follow quite a few teams around the league fairly closely. I can’t tell you who Sacramento’s 12th man is, anymore, but can probably name you most of their roster if I had to. Just don’t ask me to watch a lot of their games. At least not this year.
Anyone wondering where I got the name for the blog, it’s from the movie Hoosiers, one of the best basketball movies made. Dennis Hopper’s character, Shooter, after being forced to take over the team when Gene Hackman’s character, Coach Norman Dale, gets thrown out of the game again (on purpose), calls the play, the picket fence. What it is a simple set of picks to get a shooter open for a shot.
