Happy Season Preview Day!

Today is a day for celebration — it’s Hardwood Paroxysm’s eighth birthday AND we’re rolling out the 2015-16 Hardwood Paroxysm Season Preview. I have been a part of HP for nearly five years and I am still in awe of the legacy that’s been built, still starstruck by the people I get to write with, to talk basketball with, to call friends and colleagues. HP is a great many things but, to my mind, it is first and foremost a community. The websites in the HP Basketball Network are just the forward-facing product of shared conversations and experiences, interactions that stretch from our writers to our readers and the blurry borders where they meet. It’s an honor to be serving as Editor-in-Chief.

Our season previews are always a little different each year but they are always a reflection of that community as well — diverse in style and tone, chaotic, both fun and serious — conversations about basketball from every angle. If you’re a regular reader of HP, then you’ll love what we’ve put together for you this year. If this is your first experience with HP, well then you’re in for a treat.

Our community has grown quite a bit this year and you’ll discover a lot of wonderful new voices in the pages that follow. In terms of structure we’ve kept some things the same and branched off in some new directions as well. You’ll find more art in this year’s season preview than ever before. If you enjoy it, be sure to check out the artists bios and get in touch, let them know that you liked and appreciated their work. As usual we have written features but also statistical analysis from our friends at Nylon Calculus, playful content from Friendly Bounce and insight into the young players just enter the league from the writers at Upside and Motor.

One of the biggest changes this year is that we’re not bringing you the season preview in a static PDF file. This season we’re using this digital publishing platform at Joomag to create the best possible product for our season preview and to launch a new initiative. This year HP will be publishing a quarterly digital magazine at Joomag, the season preview is Issue No. 1. At the bottom of this page you’ll find an embedded viewer, or you can follow this link to find it at Joomag. You may have already worked this out for yourselves but you can purchase this preview for $4.99 or, for just $10 more, you can subscribe to the quarterly effectively getting yourself a discount on the ensuing issues. I know this represents a price increase over previous season preview issues but the money is being used to create a better product for you and to compensate the writers and artists (even though it’s not even close the Scrooge McDuck-sized piles of money they deserve). We’d love if you’d buy the preview. And we’d love if you’d subscribe to the Quarterly and help us bring you new and better content, in new and better ways.

Thank you so much to all the writers who poured their time and creativity into this project. And an especially large thank you goes to the artists who contributed to this year’s preview. Without them willingly jumping down several tiers in the publishing world (for what I’d like to think is a worthy cause) this would just be one enormous, 378-page word document. Their talents have really pulled this entire project together and I can’t thank them enough, especially Daniel Rowell for being the first to sign up, and Matthew Hollister for taking it upon himself to organize and wrangle so much beautiful work. Thanks to Jared Dubin, Jordan White, Amin Vafa, Jack Maloney, Scott Rafferty and Seth Partnow, the best damn part-time editing team in the small-market blogging business.

It’s a happy coincidence, heavy on symbolism, that we’re releasing this season preview on HP’s eighth birthday. We hope that it reflects our past and our future. But mostly we hope it gets you excited for another season of NBA basketball.

Welcome to the Paroxysm.