What’s Ahead For HoopsHabit.com?

As we enter our third full season on the web (and our first full season on the FanSided network), we’ve got our sights set high. You’ve come to expect a perfect combination of quality and quantity from us, as we strive to cover the entire NBA (and soon, NCAA). That’s not going to change — not in a bad way, at least. You will notice a couple of changes this season as we look to become the largest and most prolific standalone basketball site in the world. Here’s what you can look forward to:

ALL THE COVERAGE

We enter this basketball season with 50 awesome writers, each as hungry as the next, as we try to collectively explode onto the national landscape. Because we’ve got so many regular writers, we’re able to guarantee that your favorite NBA team WILL be covered. You’re not going to get less than two pieces per week for your team at any point in the season. Some of the bigger sites ignore less popular teams — not us.

This is the first season when we’re really making a push to cover more of the college game. We’ve brought in Ed Issacson, the head of NBA Draft Blog, as our resident prospect expert. We’ve brought in writers to cover each of the major conferences, as well as national NCAA writers who will look at the college game as a whole. It’s a work in progress, but you can be certain that we’re making strides to cover the players that will make up the NBA in the near future.

UPPING OUR TWITTER GAME (@HoopsHabit)

We want to be available to you. We want to hear what you have to say. We feel like the community of writers we’ve built is strong, but we dropped the ball last season as it relates to creating the kind of place where the writers and readers can share, argue, chat and just hang out. We want that sense of togetherness and we want to be more prevalent on our different social media platforms.

Expect to see a lot more tweets from us — and not just articles — but expect to see more engagement, more polls, more questions and more everything. In addition to our three editors (Michael Dunlap, Phil Watson, Gerald Bourguet), we’re going to hand the keys to our authors at times, so you can interact with them.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF CONTENT

In the past, we’ve stuck to what has worked best for us. We look for a good blend of standalone pieces and slideshows to give each of our readers what they want. For a while we had our HoopsHabit Hangout, which was a show that we posted on YouTube for each of you to watch. We’ll be continuing that this season in a podcast format. We’ll also start delving back into Fantasy Basketball. We’d love to do more roundtables and we’d love to get all of you involved.

We’re going to try a lot of new things this year, some may work — some may not. We want to hear what you have to say about it, though. Come talk to us on Twitter. Leave a note in the comment section. Contact me directly via email (michael.dunlap (at) fansided.com). Bottom line — we want to please our dedicated readers and make things better for everyone.

HOW CAN YOU HELP?

I don’t expect to be able to mobilize the hundreds of thousands of you that visit our site each month, but I do encourage you to help us spread the word. If you like a piece, share it on Facebook or Twitter or Google+. If you get fired up over an opinion you don’t agree with or maybe you couldn’t agree more and want to thank the writer — do so! Hit those comment sections.

We couldn’t have a successful site without all of our readers and we won’t be able to continue to grow without your help. We’ve all got a basketball addiction, which is why we love this site so much. Let’s all come together each day to help spread it out, so that more people can develop a HoopsHabit.

-Michael Dunlap
Founder and Editor-in-Chief, HoopsHabit.com