Hornets Hype

Previewing the series over on the Dime blog: NBA Playoff Blogger Faceoff: Nuggets vs. Hornets. If it’s not as snarky/hyped as I usually am, I apologize. I was kinda hungover when I wrote it.:-P

And, First Round Roundtable on At the Hive.

Hope everyone’s loving NBA Playoff Day 1 and French Quarter Fest!

Woe. There is no hype. There is anti-hype.

I’m not really going to talk about the Rockets game. There are plenty of other places you can take part in the meltdown. I’m not going to complain about the officiating because, while it was bad, it was so not the reason we lost that there isn’t any point. I was gonna have Pose write you some sad haikus, but unfortunately he and I aren’t speaking right now.

Anyhow, I just wanted to give you the heads up on some upcoming stuff:

1. NBA.com just unveiled its 2009 NBA Dance Team bracket. The Honeybees are up against the Lakers Girls, and amazingly, the picture they chose to represent the team is way better than the Lakers’ one. I think they might have a chance…. So, OK. I didn’t think anyone really paid attention to this stuff. Come to find out, mW takes it quite seriously. He even visits the team’s website to peruse the girls. But only, he informs me, in the case of tiebreakers…

……………… right.

2. Inspired by the NBA Dance Team bracket, I’ve decided to roll out the First Annual NBA Hot Baller bracket. Yes! I’ll probably be starting Thursday or Friday. That means all of you who are dudes can just scroll on by and roll your eyes, while all 5 of us female basketball fans vote for the hottest team in the NBA! I don’t think I’m going to bother with actual seeding based on looks, because that would be highly subjective. I’ll do the matchups based on actual team seedings as of tomorrow. And then, you know, let things play out where they fall. Also, in most cases it’s not going to be only one guy per team. Teams will be represented by their very best. Sorta like the dance team bracket, where you put your three best-looking girls in the front of the photo while hiding the unfortunate-looking ones in the back…

3. Thursday night is Casino Night, which is basically a season ticketholder event where you can mingle with the players… Well, or they’ll deal you a game of blackjack or something. There are prizes and food, and we’ll be there hopefully taking pictures, which we’ll post up. It was fun last year, but we got there a little too late to see some of the players, like Chris Paul, who put in his appearance early. I coulda met David West… we were like two ships passing in the night– OK, lurking by the buffet table– but he kinda looked like he wanted to stay incognito.

I’m out like the Hornets’ fourth-quarter offense…

The only Twitter feed on our site right now is TT6’s, but you may have noticed she put up a link to where you can find my Twitter feed too, over on the right sidebar.  In case you missed it, you can follow me @ mW_.  I usually tweet from the games and try to pick up on stuff that you can’t see on television.

I also try to keep up with other NBA bloggers and tweeters and re-tweet the best stuff they do that you might not catch.  Well, I’ll be at it tonight at the Hive against the Thunder.  Go Hornets!

So yesterday I was kind of annoyed to hear from several sources that a Hornets employee,who joined the team when they were in Oklahoma City, had made some slightly rant-y Facebook comments regarding New Orleans fans. My negative response to this was on three levels:

1. When I heard about it, I was already previously annoyed by watching Gil and Bob’s cheerful “party line” all evening on CST. I just felt like the comments the organization was making were insulting to fans’ intelligence.

2. I think the Hornets organization probably does not realize sometimes how incredibly sensitive people here still are about the OKC thing. They’ve still got to be REALLY careful, last season notwithstanding.

3. Characterizing New Orleans fans as people who impulsively “give up on”  teams is just inaccurate, when you stop to think for more than three seconds about how they’ve loved a losing football franchise for 42 years.

We are firm defenders of New Orleans at this site. I acknowledge having put this person on a certain List of mine, because I was annoyed. But. I wasn’t expecting this thing to get out of hand, which I think it has. It’s kind of blown up in a way that got really nasty, really fast.

I don’t feel like people’s social lives need to be scrutinized or questioned, even if I don’t agree with the things they say. No one deserves that. So I am deleting all references to this line of conversation from this site. Thanks. Peace out.

I was going to do a whole post about this two days ago, but unfortunately, right about the time I went live with the new blog layout, the Tyson Chandler trade soap opera began. And will not end until about three hours from now.

So let’s talk about our new, bluer look. First off, if you’re having any issues, feel free to comment with your computer specs (Mac or PC) and what browser you’re currently using. This will only help me. I didn’t make the new design from scratch, and I’m not sure I know enough about PHP to have been messing around with other people’s quite as much as I have in the last week. Update: If you are using IE, let me know if you are or aren’t having the issue where the gallery up top is slow to load and the pictures appear down the background of the page. I’ve got 2 PCs, and one’s having it and one’s not. I’ll try to figure it out. For now, Firefox.

Second, please bear with us as I will continue to mess around with the placement of ads, links, etc. in the sidebar until I’m 100% happy with them.  So if you see something weird off to the right, that’s just me tweaking the layout.

Third, you might have noticed that there’s a little image next to everyone’s name in the comments. It’s using  Gravatars, which are basically a globally recognized avatar that’s linked to your email address. So you can go enter your email address over there, upload an image, and you should get a small picture on this site and any other sites that use them and require an email address in the comment field.

And now we wait. Perhaps the blue will calm you.

The Hype is taking a much-needed vacation.

A little warm weather relaxation,  a little All Star watching, maybe a little site redesign, but mostly hitting the streets of Uptown with a dash of Bring Your Own Beverage for the first big parade weekend.

But before you head out there, you should totally check out At the Hive’s excellent post on the State of the New Orleans Hornets. I can say this stuff a hundred times, but at the end of the day it’s based on love, not stats, and no offense, love ain’t gonna get you many rebounds and second chance points. But numbers don’t lie, and the post has a numerical breakdown of what’s gone wrong for the Hornets this season so far, and what needs to happen for it to go right in the final 32 games.

So, go forth, friends, and remember to rep the Hornets in your teal & stripes at the parades this weekend! ‘Cause there’s a lot of basketball yet to be played. And no one gets drunk or laid at a pity party.

See you on the flipside of the season.

P.S. I would like to thank the Great NBA Love of My Life Paul Pierce, who singlehandedly dropped Dallas in the 4th quarter last night to put the Mavs below the Hornets in the standings heading into the All Star break. Forgiven!

In these dark times, what’s better than the Hornets singing Good Times?

I think you’ll all agree, with the exception of if Chris Paul was playing tonight, nothing.

Oh, and in other pregame linkage, Ticktock6 does some Hornets Q&A on Talk Hoops.

Good luck tonight AD! … We out.

I wrote a guest post on being a girl (ha) and how I got into watching the NBA. Leaving a couple of things out, because it’s just a short post. Like how I was already a major hockey fan growing up, so sports weren’t exactly alien to me. But it’s just my funny story on how I went from staring into space at Hornets games to starting this blog, so you all can go check it out. Dime Magazine’s website is one of my daily stops for news and thoughts on what’s going on in the NBA.

(There is already one comment on whether or not I’m hot. LOL. We all know I am the queen of the ambiguous photo.)

Because sometimes weird people get here by Googling weird stuff.

1. “how tall was Chris Paul in high school” - 6′5″. He shrunk.

2. “ceiling fan repair service” - This one always makes me laugh. Because I totally know why it happens. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here’s Tyson Chandler’s For Love or the Game. Of course his wife wins, because the teammate always says dumb stuff on these things and loses. In this particular video? The highlight is Jannero Pargo saying, with a perfectly straight face, if Tyson wasn’t in the NBA, he’d be a ceiling fan repair man.

3. “Peja’s hot wife” - Yeah. We know.

4.“James Posey girlfriend” - Ladies. We need to talk. Now, James Posey has been known to inspire man-crushes and crushes alike, because of his mad D and clutch 3. However. Do you really want to date this man? Really? Really? Aw, you know I love Posey. But he might… wait for it… be a little sketch.

5. “Hornets to Seattle.” - No.

I save this kind of stuff to take the edge off, you know, after the team blows a first half lead at home to another inferior First rule of Hornets slump: don’t talk about it. But if you’re a glutton for more punishment, or are interested in learning about this stuff, At the Hive breaks down some of last night’s defensive breakdowns with video. Wait… that didn’t sound right. Dammit, now MY GAME IS LAZY TOO. See what you’ve done.

Yahoo’s Ball Don’t Lie is doing “The Blog Association,” which takes a team-by-team look at the top NBA blogs. Here’s what they had to say about us:

2. Hornets Hype — OK, so Ticktock6 and mW are a little perturbed, at times, and I’m pretty perturbed that they stole the sportcoat and jeans look that I told everyone to lay off of back in 2001 because I was going to be the one to bring it back.

Either way, they run a great blog, they’ve the right attitude, and the former’s post about Katrina and its aftermath ranks up there with just about the best thing I’ve ever read on any blog, at any time, on any subject.

Also making appearances, naturally, were At the Hive, 247, and our German Hornets friends. Don’t burst my bubble by pointing out there aren’t that many Hornets blogs… just don’t.

Concurrently with seeing ourselves on BDL, I decided to celebrate with an act of startling ineptitude: I (apparently, can’t figure out how the hell else it happened, so it had to have been me) accidentally deleted about 15 comments on the previous two posts. So, if it was your comment, sorry. I think I did it while I was trying to regulate my penis spam.