Hoops Fans, never fear, the hoops blasts are still here:
I think we’re going to start seeing a general trend to extend windows of interest around sports moments in time. In anticipation for this year’s NBA Draft, the NBA launched an Official Facebook NBA Draft picks application, here.
The Golden State Warriors added a Facebook Live connection for the Draft. Essentially if you logged into their Draft Central area on NBA.com, your comments also showed up on your Facebook page. For the draft, it was perfect as it added exponential scale to each fan's activity. (How many people were on Facebook, saw the post, and thought "oh yeah, the Draft is on now?"). Story here.
Several of the NBA draftees tweeted through the draft, including
Blake Griffin
Hasheem Thabeet
Ricky Rubio
Brandon Jennings
Terrence Williams
Prospective Pro Kyle McAlarney, blogged along the way through his preparation for the draft. It was pretty interesting to follow this through workouts and team meetings. Though he didn’t get drafted, but he’s blogging about his continued chasing his dream, and this is a fantastic message. “I want everyone to know that just because I didn't hear my name called, I remain as confident as ever that someday I will make it to the NBA. I feel like a little kid going through this process, dreaming the biggest dreams. In time, I believe it will happen. For the people who laugh while reading this and doubt me, in the back of your minds you know that no one or nothing you say is going to phase my determination to succeed.”
Check his blog here:
On the other end of the spectrum, top pick Blake Griffin is being chronicled by ESPN the Mag in their annual series “The Rookie.” Here’s a link – you can check out some ridiculous training he’s putting himself through, including running up sand hills with a weight vest on while carrying a 20 pound medicine ball. He’s a beast. Just check this out!
In sync with the NBA Draft, EA Sports unveiled Blake Griffin as the cover of their NCAA Basketball 10 game.
The NBA Finals also served as key launch points for gaming. EA Sports announced Dwight Howard as the cover of NBA Live 10 and 2K Sports announced Kobe Bryant as cover of NBA 2K10. EA unveiled their choice with a Dwight Howard cover launch video, featuring a pretty sick voiceover from Mos Def.
EA also announced a weekly blog entry (every Friday) that will chronicle every aspect of the game for fans – starting with “drastically improved net and rim physics” which totally has me intrigued. Is there a better sound to hear than that ball through the net? This will get followed up on with a Monday recap on EA Sports Live Radio. I’m digging the connection to fans. Here's the link.
Meanwhile, 2K announced the cover of NBA 2K10 with this Spike Lee commercial:
NBA 2K10 also introduced fan voting for their cover. Pick which one of the four covers you like on their site (all Kobe, one of them with Kobe as a Knick) I love the idea of fan voting for a cover (actually I’d rather see fans make their own covers period – seems to be the time for that now… don’t tell me who should be on the cover, let me create my own version!). Link here.
Kobe Bryant was named the most marketable player in the NBA, according to Forbes.
ESPN interviewed Kobe on being on the cover. Pretty solid read here, as Kobe puts it “Video games were a big part of my childhood, especially basketball video games, so it’s cool to be the face of a game.”
The NCAA and NBA partnership to improve youth basketball unveiled more details during the NBA Finals. They made a powerful statement – appearing in a press conference here with Coach K (on their board), and Nike plus Adidas (that’s a pretty powerful foursome to the average hoops player!) Here’s the press conference.
Active.com will operate iHoops.com, which will launch this fall and provide skill-training curriculum (instructional videos), certification programs for coaches and officials and the opportunity to register for events, tournaments and programs. The site hopes to be packed with highlights from tournaments. Link here and here.
Watching the late night TV show coverage of this year’s NBA Finals made me realize how monstrous a role the interviewer plays on the outcome of an interview. Great things to keep in mind!
Here’s Steve Nash on the Late Show:
And here’s Guillermo, on Jimmy Kimmel, interviewing Kobe:
Also on late night TV, you need to check this out: It’s the Dwight Howard Most Valuable Puppet commercial. Hilarious stuff.
I came across a couple of interesting developments in Asia. The NBA will hold their first-ever exhibition game in Taiwan. The Nuggets and Pacers will play a pre-season game in Taipei. Link here:
2K Sports announced they will be launching NBA 2K in Asia this fall. Link here.
Kentucky’s Coach Calipari traveled to China, and met with TOM.com. He posted this to Twitter, “Met with tom.com, tryin 2 get new web page into china. Lookin promising. Had 2 interviews w/ major sports papers (2 mil readers daily)...” Interesting!
And, if you really want to get hyped for college hoops, check this Terminator trailer created by George Mason. I'm pumped!
This month also marked E3, the gaming showcase event, packed with a few things you need to check out. First, EA Sports unveiled their new site. According to this release, in the past year over 2 million game highlight videos have been posted to an EA website and over 1 million photos had been inserted into EA games from an EA website (wow). But these sites weren’t connected together in one family. So what does connecting them together mean?
Consumers are now directly connected into the product dev teams as games are being created. For now it feels like a one-way conversation, albeit a cool one, where EA releases new posts each week and the community responds. But I see this moving into a two-way conversation where fans are actually shaping features in games as they develop. That’d be sweet.
The site features a video editing sweet to make it easier to edit the highlights you create and share them with the community. If over 2 million highlights were posted when it was relatively challenging to do, this could be very interesting…
And most cool to me, there will be chances to create things on EA Sports.com and download them to a game, such as team customization and player personalization. This is being introduced through this summer’s NCAA Football 10 Team Builder feature, where you can create your own team on EA Sports.com from uniforms to stadium to logo to mascot, then post them online and share them with others. Here’s a nice quote on it, “Now users can mix and match alternative jerseys with home helmets, and away uniform pants. The possibilities are opened-up with these available options. This could potentially be a favorite of mine so I can customize my Hurricanes in their sweet gear.” This could get crazy!
While that’s all pretty cool, combine that with the fact that this fall Xbox Live will now integrate with Twitter and Facebook and things get crazy. Using Facebook Connect, this will allow you to pull in your Facebook feed into your gaming world. This will make gaming even more social and it’s going to amp up the sharing of highlights and screen grabs straight into your Facebook or Twitter feeds. This feature is launching in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10. Story here.
Meanwhile, 2K Sports is trying to build physical community, opening their offices in California for fans to come in and demo their games. Check here.
Finally, just because it’s not hoops doesn’t mean it’s not cool thoughts of the month… Twitter powered this year’s Major League Baseball First Year Player draft. They’ve evolved the draft in a monster way over the past few years. This year’s draft coverage on MLB.com featured a live feed from Twitter which mixed fans with MLB draft experts and young players who were being drafted (a virtual green room). How cool is that? MLB columnists Jonathan Mayo and Lisa Winston mashed together with pitcher Drew Storen from Stanford, high school pitcher Eric Arnett, and high school outfielder Jacob Marisnick. Blue Jays fans saw Marisnick named to their team and then saw his tweet: “#mlbdraft- Can't wait to get to the mall and get a Blue Jays hat!!” Full read here.
Until next month,
AP
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