"You're a Warriors fan. Your team
has missed the playoffs for 12
straight years. Draft night is the
highlight of your season."
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.