The First

I feel I should begin on a personal note, if only to provide context for the opinions and analysis to come.  For the last few years I've wanted to start an NBA blog, and finally found the impetus when I registered for the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference and realized I'd look pretty stupid going there without ever having written a word about the NBA.  In light of the exponential growth I expect for this blog (sarcasm font), it's best to get these boring personal details out of the way now when I have precisely zero readers.

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and have loved sports since 1985, when my nascent sports fandom was nurtured by one of the greatest football teams of all-time.  Chicago in the 80s and 90s was, of course, a fortuitous time and place to fall in love with the game of basketball.  My dad certainly played his part in that as well.  He made sure I was the only 4th grader at my local park who could make a left-handed layup, even if I was also the only one who couldn't jump.

In high school, I toiled as an end of the bench small forward on the freshman and sophomore teams, but by the time I'd turned 16 I'd grown to 6'5" and a wispy 140 lbs.  That was enough to get me on the varsity as a junior, and to earn me the nickname Holocaust Survivor.  One of my great regrets is that I never amounted to much as a high school basketball player, mostly due to my abject laziness in the weight room.  My senior year, I averaged 4 points a game as a sometime starting center.  When I finally discovered the gym my freshman year of college at Tulane, I put on 30 pounds and evolved into a pretty good pickup player who could at least put up a fight against Division I players.  After college I went to law school at University of Arizona, and have lived in the Bay Area since 2007. 

In my post college years, a moribund Bulls franchise left me little choice but to become a fan of the league as a whole.  I'd been reading Rob Neyer and Baseball Prospectus since 1998, but my life as an NBA fan really began to evolve in 2002 when I wondered if there was anyone out there doing that type of writing in basketball.  That led me to John Hollinger's old blog, alleyoop.com, which fittingly has evolved into a new guise as a math tutoring website with his departure for greener pastures.  Since then, I've been a voracious consumer of ESPN's and SI's online NBA coverage.  My Google Reader includes Hollinger, TrueHoop (and the TrueHoop Network), the Point Forward, Basketball Prospectus, Chicago Bulls Confidential, and Grantland.

With that in mind, here's what you can expect from this blog.  It will deal mostly with the NBA, which I follow as much as any person with a real job possibly could.  You will probably get a lot of Bulls analysis (I try to watch at least some of every game), and a higher than average amount of the Warriors since they're the local team.  I also love Team USA and take great pride in American basketball, so there will be a lot of posts on that as well. Aside from that, I'll just touch on any NBA story I find interesting.  I'm rehabbing from a torn ACL and patellar tendon that I suffered back in June, but once I get back on the court you can expect a few pickup game observations too.  On to the posts.