BallHype Blog

Anyone playing the Golden Picks Contest can provide a quote for the contest’s weekly leaderboard. (Yes, they look a bit like epitaphs.) A couple of people this week have posed questions, which I thought I would answer here rather than in private messages. It may be that the questions were simply meant to be rhetorical but you never know.

Dex, who had the top score in the NBA category two weeks ago (Jason was disqualified - no one really knows why), asks: “Eventually, do we get money or something from this or is this another useless talent like my ability to tell when my cat is lying to me?”
We’ll be giving out small prizes for the weekly contests soon. In the meantime, it’s good to practice. Plus, the NBA weekly game picks will be used as the tie-breaker for the NBA Playoffs Pick’em Contest. I also think being able to read your cat’s mind must have monetization potential, you just have to think harder.

bucksox, currently this week’s NHL games leader, asks: “why does the week begin and end tuesday?”
Monday night football. I know it’s not football season, but we like to plan ahead around here. That, and weekends tend to be a little slow on Ballhype — apparently a lot of sports fans do their web surfing on company time — so we want to let people get back into the office on Monday, check their picks and change them if they want before midnight.

That wraps up the Q&A. If you have any others, you can send them to me directly, use the contact us form, or just ask the leaderboard.

The site will be up but we’ll be taking a break this evening to attend the Warriors-Wizards game at the Oracle Arena tonight, joining a contingent from the Golden State of Mind community. Thanks to the efforts of the GSoM guys, we’ll have a chance to get in early and watch the warm-ups from courtside, and meet other local basketball fans. We’re even going to use the opportunity to give away our first Ballhype tchotchke!

If we lived in Detroit, we’d sign up for the Need4Sheed/Detroit Bad Boys Blogfest. It’s very cool that offline connections are happening among the sports blogging community. Ballhype is just getting started but in the future we hope Ballhype will help make more of these kinds of events easier to organize.

Update: It was a fantastic game!

… we hope. Jason’s pre-Ballhype projects (lowpost, striketwo, and faircatch) got a shout-out today from Dan Shanoff and Jamie Mottram’s Top Twenty Most Influential Sports Bloggers. As Howie noted, Jason is in good company.