As most of you are well aware, the 2006 NBA Draft will be held tomorrow night. For many fans, this is the most optimistic time of the season. After all of the picks and trades have been consummated, it's easy to imagine that your favorite team has "tremendous upside potential."

Despite the fact that 2006 looks to be a down year for draft talent (just ask soccer fans and poker aficionados), an amazing amount of draft coverage has been showing up in NBA blogs. Examples:

• Jeff from CelticsBlog published the longest NBA Carnival to date, including draft-related blurbs for all 30 first-round picks.
• AOL Sports is flying J.E. Skeets from The Basketball Jones to New York to cover the evening's festivities live. Hopefully he isn't going to try to fly Air Canada again tomorrow.
• Henry Abbott from TrueHoop is asking readers to brace themselves in preparation for the onslaught of content that will hit his site tomorrow.
• Justin and Ryan from Killer Crossover posted 5 podcast episodes in the past week, incorporating several other bloggers into a mega-mock draft.
• Plenty of other individual mock drafts have been posted, including CelticsBlog.com, Philly 5, SonicsCentral.com, NBA Draft Blog, End of the Bench, BlazersBlog, HoopsAddict.com, Raptors Den, It's Good to be the Kings, and Gilbert's Arena.
• Update: Draft-related photoshop comics have appeared on YAYsports! NBA and NBA Basketball and Other Unrelatedness.
• Much more additional coverage than I can list here ... try searching lowpost.net for "draft" to get a taste.

Naturally, there is also a lot of live-blogging and webcasting planned for the actual draft event ... so far, this includes:

• Kurt from Forum Blue And Gold.
• The guys at BlazersBlog.
• The On-Hoops team.
• JB and Justin from the Celtics Stuff Live webcast.
• Tobias Seitz, a German professional player from HoopNation.de (at least, I think that's what this means).
• Update: The guys at Golden State of Mind.

When you think about it, grassroots or fan-based journalism is a natural fit for events like the draft. There are plenty of rumors, evaluations, and predictions to discuss beforehand, and lots of opportunity for analysis and second-guessing afterward.

One last note: the following chart shows the number of weekly posts from NBA blogs monitored by lowpost.net since the beginning of the year. The red bars represent all posts referencing the draft, and the blue bars represent all other posts. The trend direction is about what you would expect. This week, roughly half of all tracked posts are somehow draft-related.

In a way, it's fitting that the Heat won the NBA championship last night ... today is the summer solstice, and it was the hottest day of the year so far in the Bay Area.

And, with the commencement of the NBA offseason, it also seems like a fitting time to make one final baseball-related announcement here: sister site striketwo.net now has an exciting new blog.

The striketwo.net blog figures to be a compelling destination for baseball fans. First of all, there's a top-notch sports blogger at the helm: Matt Watson, known to many basketball fans via the terrific Detroit Bad Boys blog.

Second, it leverages and incorporates much of the striketwo.net baseball blog-tracking application. Matt is extremely tech-savvy, and he'll be using the public striketwo.net site as well as a set of advanced internal tools to identify breaking stories from around the league and highlight some of the best baseball-related blog content around.

Finally, it will be updated very frequently. The blog hasn't even officially launched, and it already has more posts than I've written in the last 3 months.

So, if you're a baseball fan, be sure to check it out and let Matt know what you think.

I got an email two weeks ago from Jeff of the extremely popular CelticsBlog.com site, suggesting that we take a look at risers and sliders in the NBA draft—guys whose stock rose or fell in the weeks leading up to the draft. He was wondering whether it would be possible to detect a correlation between rising or falling in the draft and eventual performance in the league. Since the 2006 draft is now two weeks away, this is a timely topic for fans in Boston, Oakland, and most other NBA cities.

For those of you who didn't arrive here from Jeff's site, be sure to check out his post for more background information as well as a detailed analysis of the results. His idea for identifying risers and sliders was to compare actual draft picks with pre-draft projections. I was able to dig up projections using old mock drafts from NBADraft.net (see below for more details).

The last 5 years of NBA drafts are presented below using sortable tables. By default, the tables for each of the seasons are sorted by the difference between actual and mock picks—this means that the biggest sliders appear at the top, and the biggest risers (or reaches) appear at the bottom. You can click the various table headers to sort by actual picks, mock picks, or any of the other columns. The tables include all players who were either drafted in the first 30 picks or projected to be drafted in the first 30 picks.

Sorting the tables by this past year's regular season PER rating provides another interesting view (click the 05-06 PER column twice to sort descending). By observing where the top players (so far) were picked, you can second-guess the scouts and executives responsible for each year's draft. The 2001 draft seemed to produce the most unexpected results—as of this season, 3 of the top 4 players were picked between 25 and 30.

Choose a season: 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005

Choose a season: 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005

Collecting the data for this analysis was made possible through these terrific online resources:

• NBADraft.net: for mock drafts from the past five years
• The Internet Archive: for access to those mock drafts*
• Basketball-Reference.com: for full draft results and 2005-06 PER ratings

* Unfortunately, the sporadic availability of the archived mock drafts resulted in a lot of variation in the timing of the mock drafts from year to year: two were pulled from March, two from May, and one from June.

A fun new feature was rolled out to lowpost.net and striketwo.net this evening: Player and team trend charts. Each player and team page now contains a chart that shows how often they have been referenced in tracked blogs over the past several weeks. Specifically, the chart measures the percentage of posts referencing the player or team by week. You can click any of bars to view the matching content for that week.

Some examples:

• The Sam Cassell trend chart shows a modest amount of coverage during the regular season, with a strong post-season surge that coincided with the Clippers' playoff run.
• The Golden State trend shows a peak in early December, and a steady decline throughout the season and postseason as it became increasingly clear that the Warriors were going to miss the playoffs for the 12th straight year.
• Kobe Bryant's chart shows relatively high frequencies throughout the year, with two big spikes corresponding to his 81-point game and the conclusion of the 7-game Lakers-Suns series.

There are undoubtedly plenty of other interesting trends ... if you find one, feel free to leave a comment.