SheridanHoops has assembled a staff of distinguished contributors and columnists.
The lineup:
JAN HUBBARD (Monday columns)– Jan began writing about the NBA in 1976 while working in a small Texas Gulf Coast newspaper 90 miles north of Houston. The NBA became a full-time job in 1980 when he covered the expansion Dallas Mavericks, and he worked for two newspapers in the Dallas area before accepting a job with Newsday in New York in 1989. He then left journalism in 1993 to work with the NBA communications group for eight years, serving as media relations director and head of publications. He left the NBA in 2001, returned to Texas and still writes about the NBA on a freelance basis. He has covered three Olympics, including the ascension of international basketball at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, where the Soviet Union won the gold and Yugoslavia won the silver. In 1992, along with Mark Heisler, he was one of the few American journalists to cover the Dream Team from Day 1 at training camp in San Diego to the gold medal victory in Barcelona. And during that period, he even played golf with Charles Barkley – before Barkley’s swing was cursed. You can follow him on Twitter @whyhub.
CHRIS PERKINS (Tuesday columns) — A sportswriter with 20 years of experience, Perkins was there the night Miami Heat teammates Jason Williams and Antoine Walker argued with each other on the court for so long they incurred a delay of game warning. Perkins was also in the Heat locker room the night angular forward Rasual Butler donned Shaquille O’Neal’s winter coat and paraded around like a 5-year-old wearing his father’s over-sized clothes. That’s the beauty of the NBA – you never know what you’ll see. In the previous nine seasons covering the Miami Heat, Perkins has covered some of the most interesting NBA personalities of the past decade: Pat Riley. Shaquille O’Neal. Gary Payton. Alonzo Mourning. Dwayne Wade. LeBron James. Prior to that, it was a variety of sports and teams — the Miami Dolphins, University of Texas and University of Miami, among others – for the Palm Beach Post, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Through all the NBA Finals, NBA All-Star games, Super Bowls, World Series, Final Fours and college football bowl games, he still finds it gratifying to be at a plain old Tuesday night Heat-Warriors game. It doesn’t have the glitz and glamour of, say, Heat-Lakers, but it’s the NBA. You never know what you’ll see.
MARK HEISLER (Wednesday columns)- The 2006 recipient of the Naismith Hall of Fame’s Curt Gowdy Award, Mark spent 32 years at the Los Angeles Times, the last 20 of them trying to keep up with wild and crazy Lakers, who won five titles in that time while transitioning from Magic Johnson to Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, as well as the inimitable Donald Sterling, the Los Angeles Clippers owner who won no titles but was somewhat fun to correspond with. Not that Donald ever answered Mark’s open letters that offered him advice, but everyone else seemed to enjoy them. Mark’s days covering the NBA go back to the 1969-70 season when the Philadelphia Inquirer sent him to the Finals, where the Knicks put him in the upstairs press box in Madison Square Garden (next to Frank Deford of Sports Illustrated, a scribe the publicists snubbed whenever possible) to witness Willis Reed hobble onto the floor for Game 7 with one leg shot full of painkillers. Of course, Mark was so far up, he thought Cazzie Russell, who came out first, was Willis, as did much of the crowd, which cheered. After that, Mark covered all sorts of memorable things — the so-called “game of the ’70s,” the arrival of Julius Erving, the league’s near-death experience in the ’80s, the triumph of Showtime, Magic’s retirement, the Dream Team and the arrival of Shaq and Kobe, heralding more Laker glory and more adventures than anyone bargained for.
CHRIS BERNUCCA (Thursday columns) — Remember when LeBron James started talking about the final episode of “The Sopranos” right in the middle of the 2007 NBA Finals? He was answering a question from Bernucca, who covered the NBA for SportsTicker for more than a decade before moving into the freelance world. Chris first began covering basketball in the late 1980s at the college level, tracking Kyrie Irving’s father, Drederick, at BostonUniversity. He spent nearly five years at the Associated Press before joining SportsTicker, where he covered everything from David Stern to Kornel David. Chris’ work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and on the websites of ESPN, the NBA and Pro Basketball News. Born and raised in New York and blessed with a memory for all things anecdotal and a love for the offbeat story, he lives in Connecticut with his family, where he also coaches high school basketball. He will provide a constant smorgasbord of content for SheridanHoops.com.
NICK GIBSON (Friday columns)- Born and bred in Atlanta, Nick turned heartbreak into opportunity when Josh Childress left his beloved Hawks in the summer of 2008, opting instead for a gig with the Greek club Olympiacos. Once Josh’s decision had turned Nick’s attention toward European ball, forgotten faces like Trajan Langdon and Khalid El-Amin held it there, and Nick’s site, www.euroleagueadventures.com was born. Since launching ELA, Nick has watched Juan Carlos Navarro shoot Barcelona to a Euroleague title in Paris, Jonas Valanciunas ply his trade in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Nikoloz Tskitishvili amble aimlessly up and down a court in Fuenlabrada, Spain in a gym that was no larger than your high school’s. In Istanbul, Turkey, in September, 2010, Nick was blowing off his first two weeks of classes at Syracuse to cover the World Championship. He called the action live for BBC Radio when Kevin Durant willed America’s supposed ‘B-Deem Team’ past Turkey for the Gold Medal. He is still a regular correspondent on the BBC’s weekly radio program, Sportsworld, where he comments on both the NBA and European basketball. He now lives in Barcelona where he eats tapas, breathes basketball and contributes weekly to SheridanHoops.com.
GUAN WEIJIA (Friday columns) – Born and raised in Beijing, a graduate of Nanjing University, Guan (a.k.a. Vega) is a columnist and the vice director of the basketball department at Titan Sports, the most popular sports newspaper in China. He also writes for The Beijing News and qq.com. His blog at qq.com has more than one million page visits in the past nine months, and his Chinese twitter has more than 100,000 followers. As an avid basketball aficionado, Guan watches all kinds of basketball games – NBA, Chinese Basketball Association, NCAA, Euroleague, CUBA (Chinese University Basketball Association), and Jason Kidd is his favorite NBA player. Guan also serves as the color commentator for QQ Sports TV’s coverage of NBA games. The day after Dallas Mavericks won the NBA championship, Guan wrote a leading article for Titan Sports entitled “Basketball Wins” — a column considered his best work. Guan will contribute to SheridanHoops.com begining in the fall of 2011, helping introduce Chinese basketball to the rest of the world and keeping a close eye on the trials and tribulations of the American players plying their trade in the world’s most populated nation.
ADAM ZAGORIA (Saturday columns) – resident of lower Manhattan, Adam runs ZagsBlog.com and covers the New York Knicks and Big East hoops for NBA.com and SNY.tv. He also appears as a Big East Basketball Insider on SNY and 1050 ESPN Radio, and he will contribute a weekly column to SheridanHoops focusing on college hoops, recruiting, the NBA draft and a host of other items relating to players with the talent to make it to the NBA. He is an award-winning journalist whose articles have appeared in ESPN The Magazine, SLAM, Sports Illustrated and Basketball Times, he is the author of two books, including She’s Got Handle, called one of the top sports books of 2001 by The New York Times, and ULTIMATE — The First Four Decades, which documents the colorful history of Ultimate Frisbee and was featured on ESPN’s Cold Pizza.
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