Featured on lowpost.net this week is Henry Abbott's True Hoop. Much like the RZA (aka The Abbott), Henry is a leader among NBA bloggers—I don't know of a more prolific, authoritative source around. If you only read one NBA blog each day ... well, you should think about reading The Wizznutzz. But if you read two NBA blogs, be sure to make one of them True Hoop.

I interviewed Henry on Friday morning—here's the transcript:

You’re a former sportswriter for mainstream media as well as a blogger now. What do you see as some of the biggest differences between mainstream media sports writing and blogging?

Well, there are a couple of different things. One of the big things is that when I was writing for HOOP and Inside Stuff (which I still write for a little bit—I’m not totally done with that), every story that you want to do either has to be an editor’s idea, or it has to be an idea that’s cleared in advance with an editor. I’m a guy who has an idea for a basketball story about every 20 minutes, and that magazine comes out once a month. It’s just kind of hard—you don’t get to use 99% of your ideas of what might be an interesting basketball story. The blog just lets you—every time I have a friggin’ idea, I just put it up there, and start this running commentary and make it kind of a voyage, rather than "Here’s one story about Cuttino Mobley." It’s more like, here’s a little bit—I found an interesting thing about Cuttino Mobley, and a few minutes later we can revisit it then you add in the conversational element.

A big part of my job at True Hoop is listening to people—listening to people’s comments, when they email me, and call with interesting info. That part of it is unbelievable—how much more I know about the NBA now than when I was a reporter full time. People who are sympathetic to what I’m doing, read it, and they want to help, and they tell me stuff. A lot of them are involved in the NBA. That’s happening more and more now—it’s amazing. I just feel more plugged in than I was before.

I think another big difference is that I feel like my whole thesis behind True Hoop is, "I love the NBA, warts and all." I like it even though, when you go to a game, and go to the locker room, and you interview players (and I’ve done quite a lot of that), you end up having (I bet you every NBA reporter has) this kind of disillusionment: "I used to love the NBA and a lot of these people are total a-holes." It’s just the truth, and a lot of it is because you’re the media, and they’re perfectly nice guys who don’t like dealing with the media, because the media is problematic to them, and that’s totally understandable.

The league itself (not talking about the players) by and large has this notion that the way to present the NBA to the public is very sanitized. They’re not going to acknowledge that some of the people involved are really not very social. I understand why some of these players are like that, and I don’t hate them for that. It happens, and I feel like we should put that on the table too, and talk about the NBA without hiding everything. I feel like knowing everything I know about the NBA now (which isn’t an insane amount, but it’s more than most fans get to know), I still really like it. I love the NBA; it’s my great passion in life—even though I know all this dirt. I’m really not looking for dirt at all, and I hate it when I know dirty little secrets, because I don’t know what to do with them. But, there is some dirt, and that’s OK. It’s still a good product, still worth buying a ticket, I think. I feel like we should talk about honestly it like adults and intelligent people, instead of trying to make it all bright and shiny, and try to fit a square peg in a round hole.

At this point, the interview was interrupted by my son waking up 45 minutes early. As it turns out, Henry also has two very young children. We resumed several minutes later.

With the two kids, how many NBA games are you able to watch?

I’ve had to make some hard choices over the last few years. Before I had kids, I’d go to a lot of games, and I live near New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, so I could go to all three. But, now that I have kids, not only do I not get to go to a lot of games, but I don’t even like to watch a lot of TV. Life is busy. Obviously I love the NBA, but when I’m home and the kids are awake, I don’t choose to be staring at the TV.

I don’t watch a lot of games, to be honest. I try to watch during the playoffs or when there’s an interesting game. I have various ways of watching stuff online, which is pretty cool. I feel like I get to see everything that I feel like I have to see, and I pretty much see nothing else. So I kind of choose my spots. Time is just so much of the element now.

Also, True Hoop isn’t really about breaking down games. I’m interested in that, and I like it, and I did some live-blogging during the playoffs. But I feel like it’s more about what people are talking about in the NBA, which might be a game, but it also might be not a game, or something else entirely. I feel like any second that I spend watching a game is a second that I’m not checking on what they’re saying in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune today, or whatever it may be. I feel like job #1 is keeping tabs on the discourse.

I guess not watching the games helps when you’re fan of a team that isn’t winning, like the Blazers. How did you originally become a Blazers fan?

I grew up in Portland, and I went to a pretty intense school. I went to a private school where we had a lot of homework, and I spent a lot of time doing my homework, and it was boring. At some point I got a Walkman, and that was the thing—I couldn’t watch TV anymore, but I could listen to the Blazers and at least look like I was doing my homework, and sometimes even do my homework. I was probably 10 or 11 when I got that Walkman, and it was almost like a religion. I would listen to almost every game. And I would even listen to it in the car, and listen to Bill Schonely on KGW. I became a huge Blazers fan. I’d read every article in the Oregonian every morning about the Blazers, and I’d follow the Blazers hard core. I went to a few games, and it happened that some of the early games I went to were some really good ones—some great playoff wins. My dad started taking me fairly often, not a ton, but maybe 10-15 games per year. I got the bug really bad, and I’ve always been a Blazers fan. I left Portland in ’91 and followed the team from a distance ever since. So much easier following from afar now than it was in ’91, thanks largely to the Internet. I’ve followed them from all over. I’ve lived in Asia, and South America for a while, and gone to great lengths to keep tabs on how the Blazers were doing throughout the years.

There’s that Jerry Seinfeld joke about how players come and go, and coaches come and go, and ultimately, fans end up rooting for the uniforms. When you’re living in a city it’s easier to do that because everyone else is rooting for the local team, you can go out and see them. I’ve moved around a little bit, and given up my allegiances to the cities I used to live in ... I don’t know if that makes me less of a fan. (At this point, I seemed to forget that I was conducting an interview.)

I don’t pretend to understand how that fan thing works. I just know that I like me some Blazers. There is something really magical about being in a city when the team based in that city does really well. I was in New York when the Rangers won the NHL Stanley Cup. I’m not a hockey fan at all, but for that week, everyone was wearing Rangers stuff, and everyone was excited, and it was like springtime—so exciting. I was in Portland in 1990 when the Blazers were in the Finals against the Pistons. I was just getting back in Portland for the summer in ’92 when they were in the Finals against the Bulls. It’s just a great thing to be there when the team is doing well. Portland was insane during that series—it was so incredibly exciting.

I was actually a young child in Portland when they won in ’77. I don’t remember anything about that, but I do remember in the years following there was kind of a magical aura around the team. Portlanders loved the team in a way that you could feel and see, and there wasn’t a lot of cynicism about it. The irony is that the Portland franchise has had more than its fair share of good guys over the years. That championship team had a special bond—they’re all friends still. The Oregon fans are spoiled, and the Terry Porter/Clyde Drexler/Jerome Kersey teams—those were some pretty good guys. People expect NBA players to be guys you’d love to go and give a hug to. It’s starting to get like that again, but in the interim, they’ve been let down.

The fans have also been lucky with the overall success of the team—with a 2221-straight season playoff run. Obviously it’s been tough for them to take the losing and some of the bad apples over the past several years.

Yeah—I think most cities are more aware than Portland that you’re going to have some of some of those crime stories, and you’re going to have some of those losing seasons. The team has only been there since 1970 and they won the championship in 1977. They’ve been one of the better teams in the league ever since. These last few years have been incredibly hard for most Oregon basketball fans to swallow, but it’s not so atypical. Plus if you look now at what’s happening in Indiana or Boston—there are plenty of teams in rough periods right now.

Moving on, it looks like you’ve done some radio work in the past. Have you thought about doing more with podcasting?

We’ve done a little bit—there have been a couple of mp3’s on True Hoop. I think there will be more of that in the future. I like it—that’s what I got my degree in (broadcast journalism). Ninety-nine percent of what I did was radio, and I worked at CBS radio. I want to do it, the only problem is that it’s kind of time-consuming to make it sound good. Making it sound just OK is not time-consuming, but I feel like I don’t want to do anything that wouldn’t be good. I have Pro Tools, and we’ve messed with it a little bit, and trying to do it. All of my radio experience is before digital editing. I’m almost 32, but that makes me feel really old. I’m really good with a razor and a china marker and everything. If it gets to the point where I can do it easily, where I don’t spend the whole morning doing short podcasts, then I’ll definitely start doing a lot more of it.

Right—the whole morning is, what, 5 posts on the blog?

It’s so easy to put up written stuff, there’s just so much low-hanging fruit. If I spend all morning on one project or all day on a podcast then it means I’m missing out on all of the NBA stuff going on at that time. I feel pressure—I just know that every couple of hours there’s some really great NBA story that I’d love to put on True Hoop. I’m falling behind every time I spend a few hours not keeping tabs on that stuff.

What is your typical day—how do you go about finding things to write about?

The core of it is just having signed up for a million RSS feeds. Everything that has an RSS feed that might have interesting basketball content I sign up for. There’s so many now, when I started True Hoop, I could literally every day in a half hour read every RSS feed that I considered to be a good RSS feed—from a basketball blogger and every basketball section in the US. Now there’s so many RSS feeds that you can’t do that. You can’t read them all—you could spend all day trying to keep on top of that. Originally it wouldn’t be uncommon to come in and find 1500 stories. And you just kind of scan through them all, and you can do that in 20 minutes. Now I come in and it’s more like 10,000 stories, and you just can’t get them all.

So, I end up choosing who to read based on the quality of the writing and the quality of the content, which even means that there are some sources that are really, really good sources that may not often be about basketball. If the New Yorker has something about basketball, I don’t ever want to miss that or if Harpers has something about basketball, that’s usually really good stuff, or GQ recently had a lot of basketball stuff. When really serious journalists are writing about basketball—I really want to get that stuff. I’m a basketball blogger, so I read all of my favorite basketball blogs every day. That’s a lot—dozens. Obviously, I have my favorite journalists. And you have to read Charley Rosen because he’s really good to get the comments going.

What are some of your favorite newer blogs?

I like so many blogs—these are the ones off the top of my head. If I looked at my RSS feeds, I’m sure I could think of a lot more. I’m a big ClipperBlog fan—I guess everybody is, but that’s a pretty new blog. I guess I root for that SunsGossip blog. I love the art, and it sometimes makes me laugh really hard. I obviously like Sactown Royalty a lot, that’s not very new though. The Painted Area—I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Painted Area? (I am now.) They have really good basketball analysis including the European stuff. I think they really know what they’re talking about. I was listening to them a lot during the world championships, and also other times. I always try to read that one. There are so many, I could probably go on all day.

I try to keep my blogroll updated with them, but now, honestly, it’s not unusual for me to come in and see 3 or 4 emails from people saying, "hey, I started a new basketball blog ... could you add me to your blogroll?" Usually I’ll sign up for the RSS feed, and if it’s good, I’ll add it. But, it’s a lot of reading to be done nowadays, there must be 500 basketball blogs now (something like that). You’d probably know as well as I would.

Yeah, there are a lot, and this is the time of year when a lot of new ones are starting up with the new season.

One of my pet peeves about blogs, and this is just my take—I don’t pretend to know what’s good or bad. My taste is such that I don’t really want more off-the-cuff un-expert analysis. Somebody telling my why the Knicks are going to win tonight. The fact is—the Knicks themselves don’t know whether they’re going to win tonight. And if they are going to win, they don’t know how they’re going to win. It’s one of those things that we don’t get to know. I don’t feel like we need more off-the-cuff speculation. That’s one of my pet peeves. Some blogs—I don’t think they last very long, or have big audiences—some blogs have a lot of that. Being one more guy, a poor man’s version of what the talking heads are saying on TV today. I feel like it’s not the best use of blogs for me.

To me, a much more valuable thing is to have different voices on the important topics of the NBA, whatever that may be, and different perspectives. Stars are emerging all the time. They talk about if you give a million monkeys a million typewriters, one of them is going to write Shakespeare. Us bloggers—we are those million monkeys. Some of them are good, some of them are really good, and they’re people who wouldn’t have gotten a job covering in the NBA. Or they might run a blog with ad money and make some money for themselves with that. Sports writing had been a closed profession where you had to know somebody to get a job, but now suddenly it’s open, at least with the audition process. Anybody can audition. There are some really good writers writing basketball blogs.

I agree.

Finally, you're a professional blogger (this is your career). How often do you find yourself writing for something that will bring traffic to the blog versus writing about something that just interests you. Or, is it all the same?

I don’t ever think of it that way, but having spent time in newsrooms, I definitely have that ingrained sense of "ooh, this is going to be popular." When I'm reading, I feel like, "ooh, this will inspire discourse." Where my taste and news taste begin and end, I don’t know—they kind of fuse together. Like all bloggers, I look for things that people will find interesting, but I never think, this will bring traffic. I’m in this for the long haul. I want people to trust True Hoop as a source, and somewhere they can go every day to find out what’s going on. I don’t want them to think they’ve been led in for some cheap short-term ploy. I’m not going to have Basketball Porn.