Well, hello there!

Man, starting a blog is intensely intimidating. Especially a sports blog for someone like me (I'm very new to sports). So I'm going to start with something simple.

This picture is a good illustration of what drew me to care about this team. Yeah, their ball handling, speed, and talent are amazing (the end of this past week notwithstanding)--but what I love about them is how well they get along. How silly they are, and how much they just seem to have fun.

This picture (from suns.com) is just utter brilliance, from Alvin Gentry on the far left grinning from ear to ear as he watches them to Barbosa stealing food from Diaw's plate. I also love Pat Burke just being there. He's someone who rarely gets playing time, but he's eating with last year's Most Improved Player and this year's front runner (shut up, I can be biased) for 6th Man of the Year. The fact that they're having lunch in a restaurant that looks like I could afford to eat at is just the icing on the cake.

I feel like I should say something about myself to kind of set the tone for this blog. I'm obviously a Suns fan (even though I live pretty far from the Valley of the Sun). I just started paying attention to basketball last year during the first round of the playoffs. This team hooked me from the first jump ball, and I've been crazy about the game (and them in particular) ever since.

I pretty much got cable so I could follow them better without having to go to a bar every time there was a game on TV. I read everything I can about the sport in general and talk about it pretty incessantly. Even with all this being true, for some reason March Madness holds very little interest outside "Yay basketball!" to me. Probably because I'm not done paying attention to the regular NBA season yet. I feel like I'd care if it were September Madness.

The international game, on the other hand, is very exciting to me. I follow a couple teams predominantly (Brazil, France, Argentina, and when I'm feeling giving, Team USA), and may try to go to the Americas tournament.

I love the WNBA for so many reasons, I can't even begin to enumerate them here. Mostly I'm a fan of the Mystics, but that's due to location more than anything else. The only team I really dislike is the Connecticut Sun. But I'll go into that more in May-August.

For now, I think this bloated introduction entry is long enough. And...end.