You’re probably on this page because you want to know what I really think about the game. But before we get to the teams, titles, and hot-seat debates, it matters to me that you know this: what I do is the culmination of a dream, having fallen in love with sports writing as a kid through the magical prose of my Sports Illustrated idols. I’m a walking testament to the saying, “Do what you love and you won’t work a day in your life.” That I’m still living the dream, though, is the culmination of decades spent studying every aspect of the game of basketball and the business around it, always in search for the story that had yet to be told about it. That search has taken me not just around the country but around the world – surfing with members of Team USA in Puerto Rico, riding the Chinese national team bus with Yao Ming, watching the Twin Towers fall on a black-and-white TV in the coach’s office at a Partizan training camp 10 miles from Kosovo. The game is always evolving and my decades of tracking that evolution have given me the gift of not just knowing where it has been but where it is headed.

Being on TV, interviewing players and coaches or breaking down the game with former players and executives, is the glamorous part – but the ladder that got me there is composed of relationships built over the years with no cameras or microphones in sight.

I started as a beat writer, wedged into cramped locker rooms, chasing quotes before deadline, filing stories when most people were asleep and the next flight was a few hours away. I’ll never forget turning on a radio and hearing my name – mispronounced – as the host ripped my story on the discord between Chris Webber and Don Nelson. I was ultimately vindicated when Webber refused to show up after his rookie year and Nelson shipped him to the Washington Wizards, but that first bitter taste of being second-guessed – and the satisfying flush when my reporting proved to be prophetic – made me realize that covering sports at the highest level involved highs and lows as gut-wrenching and exhilarating as any rollercoaster.

Now, after more than three decades covering the league, I get to break it all down on TV, radio, a series of weekly podcasts and in books that dig into what really drives the best players, teams, and leaders. I sat with Kobe Bryant in his kitchen as a rookie and courtside after his last championship, in GM offices while they negotiated trades, in coach’s rooms while they hammered out game plans and watched careers unfold from raw rookie to Hall of Fame. My goal is, and always will be, to tell the stories no one would ever hear or read if I didn’t tell them and take you to places where even a media credential isn’t enough.

What I’ve learned is that statistics and highlights don’t capture the essence of sports – it’s knowing the people that play them and how they think and what they feel. My mantra is to remain teachable; an old editor once said my curiosity may be my greatest strength. I’m good with that. It has kept me both young and hungry and eager to find out what’s next.

I hope you use what’s on this site – the podcasts, the writing, the books, and everything still to come -- to see both the NBA (and maybe even the world) in a new way. Consider me as a resource if you’re looking to win an argument with your friends or you simply have questions about how the world of sports in general, and basketball in particular, actually works. That goes for how sports, in general, and basketball, in particular, are covered. More than anything, thanks for being here and for caring enough about the game to go deeper and join me on my journey.