BallHype Blog

But if you put it on top of a pretty vase and turned the lights down low, the new NBA ball kind of looks like the championship trophy that was just won by the Spurs tonight. And with the end of the Finals series that swept the Cavs but few others off their feet, we are nevertheless happy to announce the winner of Ballhype’s 2007 NBA Playoffs Pick’em Contest is chicocat21. The prize if you recall, is the official ball of the NBA that was unveiled with some fanfare and met with great resistance.

chicocat21 beat out 553 other Ballhype members to win the contest. Mr. or Ms. chicocat21, congratulations! You changed your bracket only once, to switch the Eastern Conference winners from the Cavs to the Pistons (your first instinct on this one was right, not that it mattered), and you picked the entire Western Conference correctly from the get-go. We’re impressed, and hope you come back to give some of the regulars in the weekly game picks a run for their t-shirt.

On Monday night, Joski got his fifth consecutive Golden Picks Award. We remarked on his achievement back when he won the fourth, so we won’t do too much whoopin’ it up today. (And yes, I realize this should have been written earlier in the week but … well, I didn’t get it done.)

However, we do have from the master himself, a deceptively simple strategy for winning:

1) teams are rarely more than 3-2 underdogs

2) all things being equal, the home team will tend to win

Why would Joski share his ancient wisdom with the rest of us? He is sick of wearing Ballhype tshirts every day. And he acknowledged that “it’ll make it a lot more challenging (and fun) for everyone if there aren’t big gaps in the odds which folks can exploit.” Note that this week he’s only in eighth place on the leaderboard, so make of that what you will.

You may recall from our previous post on Ballhype blog rankings that our algorithms now more accurately account for influence and recency when considering a site’s incoming links. With the exception of Deadspin, pretty much every blog jostles around a few positions on a daily basis because we recalculate the blog rankings each night.

Tonight, however, two blogs exploded:

1. Ladies… moved from 22 up to 7 with their hot blogger bracket which, by the way, has me kicking myself for not making sure that the men of Ballhype were represented.

How can you resist either of these guys with their dark hair and smooth, clean-cut features?

2. TrueHoop started the morning at 37, as Henry Abbott noted, “well below Mark ‘two posts a week’ Cuban.” Ok, honestly, 37th is very respectable considering we’re tracking nearly 2000 blogs, but given his readership it is somewhat puzzling. He offered this analogy:

When TrueHoop joined ESPN, I was aware that I would lose a fair chunk of the sympathy vote… It’s like when your favorite little restaurant is on the cover of a magazine. Might be better than ever, but it isn’t your restaurant anymore, you know? It’s not the underdog.

Henry wasn’t complaining to us, but his comment did make us do a little investigation to see if there was an explanation beyond TrueHoop making the Michelin Guide. Turns out, he’s wrong about the loss of blogger love since he moved to ESPN and he’s actually ranked number 2 (it is the NBA playoffs, after all). That’s a big jump and while we’re not thrilled to report our mistake, we are glad to set the record straight. The problem was that we were not properly accounting for the unusual TrueHoop URL patterns in calculating the blog rankings. (If you look carefully, the ESPN story links are different than the home page links.) Apologies to Henry and to anyone who feels scarred by moving down one notch to make room for TrueHoop at the top.

Henry, now that you’re second, I’m sure you and your bosses will be interested in our new widget that displays your ranking on your blog. It shows your overall ranking and if you focus on a sport, it includes your rank among similarly-themed blogs. Look over at the right column to see ours in action. Nice, huh? To get your own, you need to have a claimed blog. On your blog page below your avatar, there’s a link for Ranking Widget. Click it and follow the instructions.

UPDATE: Well, that didn’t last long.

We said these rankings are dynamic, and tonight we have a different #2 blog. We received a very reasonable request to consolidate the FanHouse sports into one blog, which they are, even if the end result is something like a Devastator unleashed upon the sports blogosphere. FanHouse is now the #2 sports blog in the known universe.