Hornets Hype

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.

In which the Hornets have an(other) day of the offseason and Ticktock6, freshly returned to da 504 from foreign parts a.k.a. NYC, takes a look at some of the various search terms that bring folks to our fine site.

1. “how to shoot a free throw like peja” – Dude. If we knew, we’d all be making a cool $12 million a year.

2. “do new orleans hornets not wear the teal jerseys” – Ah. You must have caught a glimpse of the team’s slightly eye-searing gold third jerseys. The Hornets usually wear the teal, but in the playoffs each time they lost, they switched to the other road jersey to mix it up a little and perhaps for superstitious purposes. Hence: Dallas Game 3 = TEAL (L), Dallas Game 4 = GOLD (W), SA Game 3 = GOLD (L), SA Game 4 = TEAL (L), SA Game 6 = GOLD (L). I’ve heard the yet-to-be-revealed new jerseys will not include the gold.

3. “what will eat hornets?” Manu Ginobili’s bald spot?

4. “what color accessories to wear with teal?” Oooh! I am actually qualified to answer this question, being one of the few female NBA bloggers! I would go with silver or white.

5. “hornets that are black white and brown” Whoa, like real ones? Like multicolored stinging bugs? Man, get some pesticide. I guess our Hornets, too, could be described to be black, white, and brown. In, um, varying shades. And with teal over the top. Otherwise they’d be naked.

6. “Charlotte Hornets to Seattle” ….

…

… There are so many things wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin.

I was just looking through my pics from this season, and besides the one with Chris Paul that was on the front of the Hornets website, I think this (below) is one of my faves (although CP is in it, too, actually, now that I look closer). I just remember being like, “I want a picture of me on the Hornets bench!”

Of course you think floor seats will be cool…

… aaaand then you realize you are sitting behind David West and you have to try to see over his back for most of the 4th quarter.

Unless this is my favorite photo from 2007-08:

The All Star logo I peeled up off the floor of the arena as we were leaving the All Star game. I had to box out a little kid to get my hands on this, too… got in there, threw an elbow or two, you know… (Oh, Ray, right back at you! I thought you were robbed for MVP. I said it then and I’ll say it now.)

All right, folks. It’s going to be tough, but I think I’m going to take the rest of the week off! Can’t be blogging every day now that the Hornets are done. (mW may want to do some kind of wrap-up post, but I think he’s shunning basketball while the pain is fresh.) This is going to be sort of an experiment in trying to wean myself slowly and painlessly off of blogging. Hopefully I can do it. I’ll still be hanging around the comments, of course. mW succeeded in not watching Celtics/Pistons last night. I watched the 4th quarter, but then the players looked too happy, so I had to turn it off.

And actually, now that the Hornets are done, it’s hitting me that there’s a surprising amount of real life stuff coming up for me. I’m going to be flying to upstate NY for my 5th college reunion next weekend, my birthday is the 6th, and as soon as I get back in town, I’ve got a massive job search coming up this summer. So, you know, if you know anyone who needs an English major, even just for the summer… fairly good writer… works well with both kids and adults… waits tables like a champ… I’m just putting it out there…

But don’t worry. I’ll probably pop back in sooner or later with some funny YouTube stuff, or something similarly lighthearted. In the meantime, feel free to discuss the future in the free agency thread (if, like me, you’re finding it hard to get over the Hornets). Or hey, give us some suggestions for next year! Should we just do the exact same thing? Continue to cover the Hornets from a hugely biased and rabid fan perspective? Add Honeybees?

I won’t leave you totally broken and alone, however. I’ll leave you with some parting words from Sporting News.

There’s a reason why you heard thousands of basketball fans moan aloud as the San Antonio Spurs finished off the New Orleans Hornets. It’s because, despite his much-publicized mean streak, Chris Paul is love.

Or — let me calm down a second here — Paul is the living, breathing epitome of the “I love this game” philosophy that still governs most fans’ attachment to the NBA. He did amazing things on the court, competed with every inch and ounce he had, showed emotion, showed compassion and showed generosity, gave strength to a broken city and created storylines for days.

Put simply, he made you feel good to sit in front of the television for three hours.

Aw. Love. Peace, buzz friends! I’m out like Isiah Thomas.

Yesterday we got TrueHooped. (Since I was home from work sick, that was a fun activity for my afternoon… just reloading the page and watching the traffic double, then triple.) Which is kind of the be-all and end-all of NBA blogging. The good news was that the site dealt with the extra traffic smoothly, despite my cheapskate ass hosting three domains on one account. It was a good day all around.

And then the Hornets made it better.

Could you have scripted a better first playoff series for Chris Paul? Old Guard vs. New Upstarts. Falling Back vs. Rising Up. And David West with another 25-point “Oh What? You Thought I Was the Fluke All Star?” night. (As my 7th grade class would say, “That’s cold.”) And no one but Hornets fans could have predicted how Jannero Pargo has gone off in this series. In fact, most media experts predicted that #7 seed Dallas would win the series, with virtually no one saying the Hornets in less than 7 games.

Honestly, I saw this happening. Not, you understand, as a definite, but as a probability I could see unfolding. “Seriously?” I thought. “If the Hornets win this series, it won’t be in 7.” I think, realistically, this series was over after Game One. Yeah, yeah, yeah, “you say that now,” but think about it. It was how the team came out after the half, down 12 points. And as they played, as Chris Paul dismantled the Mavs and took the game over, it was like watching a team realize they belong. And once you’ve got that, you don’t let it go.

If you’ve watched this team all season, you know they were capable, young, and hungry. But the thing is, most people haven’t seen this team. Until last week, the Hornets had only had 5 or 6 nationally televised games.

Well, you’ve seen them now. Get used to it.

Get used to the names. Get used to the faces. These are the faces you’ll be seeing over and over again for the next five years.

As SLAM Online wrote this morning:

Has there ever been a franchise that’s been a complete afterthought, draft one player and then all of a sudden they are a powerhouse. Chris Paul is (insert over the top praise). The Hornets season has been a smashing success. No matter what happens from here on out. The worst thing that can happen to them is they learn hard lessons. And that’s not even a bad thing.

“It’s not a blog. It’s a movement.” That’s what we here at HornetsHype like to say. Well, the movement has picked up a lot of strength. It seems as if our goals–and the team’s goals– are being accomplished every day. But I’m not going to stop blogging.

And the Hornets aren’t going to stop playing.

New Orleans Hornets vs. San Antonio Spurs. Game One. Saturday, May 2, 2008. 9 PM.

Higher and Higher.

I’ve added a Flickr album, which you can click on in the sidebar. So if you want, you can check out our photos from the Hornets “Fan Up!” Pep Rally, and our photos from when we won the CP3 for MVP video contest.

Some of the later ones are kind of blurry, because someone was drinking/celebrating the Southwest Division Title and accidentally left the zoom on even though the players were 3 feet away. (Seriously. mW saw David West’s butt once while he was fixing his shorts. We were that close. I would have been much more appreciative of David West’s naked ass, but alas.) But you can still get a good idea of how much fun this whole thing was.

Geaux Hornets!

Check out our nifty feature on Hornets.com. While you’re over there, you might as well click back out to the home page and see what else is going– oh hey, wait, who’s that with Chris Paul?

Hee.

But that’s not what I was talking about when I said the Hornets sent presents. Look at this fine, thick sheaf of playoff fun that was waiting on my doorstep in a big envelope when I got home!

As I drove past New Orleans Arena on my way home from work, the workers were putting up a giant yellow “FAN UP NEW ORLEANS” sign on the side of the arena for the playoffs. Keep up the good work, sign men!

This is a good day to be a Hornets fan.

a.k.a. Ticktock6 talks on camera… and talks… and talks…

Someone please tell me it wasn’t as bad as I remember it being! As I stood there rambling and sneaking sideways glances at myself (“SELF! We’re on the court! We’re on the jumbotron!”) on the screen, I realized that I had no clue what I was actually saying. No, seriously. It’s like I blacked out. Clearly Rob Nice does not know me. Because then he’d know that if I’m on a roll, you have to stop me. Haha.

I have gotten a lot of nice emails and messages about my video, so I just want to thank everyone! People actually came up to us in the arena because they recognized us, which felt so weird. For those who asked, the song is “Change in My Life” by Rockapella. Lots more about last night coming, but I’ve got to go through over 100 photos first.

Go Hornets! To watch Hornets/Mavs on CST or ESPN… that is the question. Oh, to be able to have such choices in life!