The Hornets have two more games to play before they wrap it up for the summer. They play at Sacramento tonight and in LA against the Clippers on Wednesday. They have approximately zero chance of making the Playoffs, so these games are kind of irrelevant and I won't be dedicating much time or text to them. My only interest is to see if Byron Scott lets the dog (read: Linton Johnson) out.
Not making the Playoffs actually works really well for my schedule, because I have a bunch of stuff besides the Hornets that I need to focus on for the next few weeks. Hence, the blog posts might be few and far between for the foreseeable future. If you haven't done so already, I recommend you subscribe to our RSS feed so you'll know when anything new is up.
Before anyone even asks, there will be no Bubble Wrap this season. If you don't know, Bubble Wrap was our yearly recap of the most memorable Hornets-related quotes (featuring cartoon heads and speech bubbles!!). It was well received the two years we did it (2004 and 2005), and I know it will be back in 2008. I pinky promise.
As for the 24/7 Awards, they won't be done in the traditional sense, but we won't neglect them either. Stay tuned. (And if you can read German, check out Philipp Langer's awards at hornets-blog.de.)
What I really want to get into today is what's next for this fantastic and humble website. It's been great to see more and more people leaving their two cents in the comments, and our hit count continues to creep up every month. However, we're not at all satisfied with Hornets247.com and these next few months should see some big improvements. Here's the plan:
I've had an unhealthy love affair with the Hornets for more than a dozen years now, and I think it's time to take the next logical step: Moving in together.
Yes, if all goes well, yours truly will be blogging his ass off from New Orleans next season. No more half-assed previews and lazy observations. I'll be living and breathing Hornets basketball and telling you all about it.
As for the site itself, you may know that we launched the current version (version 4.0) last September. You may not know that we started working on the next version last October, and it's coming along nicely. If I had to guess, I'd say it's already a 500% upgrade from the site you're seeing now.
5.0 should be good for a full launch before the 2007-08 season.
This time around, we're not going to spring a new site on you overnight. Instead, we want you to be as much a part of the new Hornets247.com as we are. We'll be doing what the geeks call a private beta launch around September, meaning the new site will be online for testing, but not open to the public. If anyone wants to participate in the testing, help us out with some feedback and get a sneak peek at the newness before most regular folk, just e-mail me (ron[at]hornets247[dot]com) with "Beta Testing" in the subject line. I'll get back to you as soon as possible.
You can also help us out right now by throwing some ideas at us. What would you like to see on this site? We take anything and everything into consideration, so don't hold back.
So yeah, that's where we're headed. Here's hoping you come along for the ride.