In my first year of blogging about basketball, one thing I found was just how many different voices can be used to describe the same basketball-related item.
For instance, there are a variety of ways I can describe Carl Landry’s season:
- I can go standard AP-esque style and say he “averaged 16ppg on 52% shooting and was thought to be a favorite to win the 6th man award before being traded.”
- I can go stat-geek and say “he posted a PER of 21 with a wp48 of .170 with the team posting a 102.1 points per possession offensive efficiency rating with him on the floor.”
- I can be objectively observational, saying “he made strides in diversifying his repertoire, displaying a jump hook to the middle for the first time, but still had trouble defensively.”
- I can be grandiloquent, describing him as “the Rockets’ peerless warrior who, before his expulsion, tirelessly slayed colossal hellions nightly within the painted area.”
- I can be a fan and say “Carl was the first Rocket since Sam Cassell and Robert Horry for whom I really felt a true sadness upon departure, due to a bond developed in witnessing his growth.”
And that’s just to name a few. (Note that the statistics cited are not accurate.)
More than just a basketball writer, as just a writer first, I found this discovery interesting and while seemingly intuitive, one I would never have made without thrusting myself into this job, despite the evidence before me daily in all the basketball writing content on the web.
There’s kind of an assumption, held even by myself formerly, that in basketball blogging, the spectrum is limited to a stat-geek/fan-voice dichotomy, and this is entirely untrue.
My dilemma has been grappling with “voice” in weighing the balance between reader enjoyment and my own desires. One of the first questions I asked Kevin Arnovitz upon signing on to this job regarded this matter: “How do you guys want me to write exactly?” I remember asking, a question so naive in retrospect, yet equally foreboding of a later challenge.
Despite the purpose of prose for an audience, the battle is really an inner one. I prefer the informal, casual voice, characteristic to what I composed during the draft and free agency. It’s cathartic, allows reign for creativity, and is not too mentally taxing as a daily obligation.
Yet at the same time, I feel a certain intellectual slothfulness when proffering opinion without support, veering me towards 82games.com in the face of an inner ‘groan’ of fatigue. I don’t have fun using stats but I feel as if I’m cheating myself when I don’t.
Each reader has one particular voice to which he feels affinity. The divide of preference is so drastic it’s almost like speaking in different dialects for different communities.
For the most part, I would say that the vast majority of readers abhor the lingua franca of the quant movement. They would just as soon prefer a manual on lawn fertilization. Yet conversely, more analytical minds won’t take seriously any opinion lacking of the stuff. Credibility is an issue extremely important to me.
It’s been an interesting process the last few months and has opened my eyes to a lot in my writing. I hope to continue improving in every voice not only to appease my own intellectual cravings but to further appeal to everyone in the language of their preference.
If you had ever wondered why my style so greatly varies from day to day, from week to week, know that it’s calculated – as odd as such divergence may seem, I’m very aware of how I choose to write each post.
