The Starters
The Basketball Jones is a popular video podcast, blog and television program that analyzes, and often satirizes, the National Basketball Association. The show is written and hosted by Tas Melas and J.E. Skeets and shot, edited, and produced by Jason Doyle and Matt Osten.
Background
Melas, Skeets, Doyle and Osten met while attending Ryerson University’s Radio and Television Arts program in Toronto, Canada from 2001 - 2005.[1]
Melas was the co-host of a talk show on SPIRITlive, Ryerson’s Internet radio station, called the “Sports Doctors.” Doyle produced the weekly program. Skeets also co-hosted a show on the station, though it was not sports related.
Upon graduation, Melas worked as a story editor at The Sports Network and Doyle worked as a sound editor for Super Sonics, an audio post-production house. Skeets worked at a physician recruiting firm and Osten attended law school at McGill University.
Skeets began blogging in 2005 when a friend bet him that he could not write a new post every day for a year.[2] The blog was called “J.E. Skeets” and was a hodgepodge of observations, photos, and videos about random, quotidian topics. Later in the year, Skeets wrote a post about basketball which was linked on Deadspin.com. Noticing a significant spike in reader traffic, Skeets began writing exclusively about basketball, usually from an irreverent and humorous perspective. He began to make his name with a popular series titled, “Romance on the Hardwood”.[2] These posts featured a photograph of two NBA players who appeared to be slow dancing accompanied by an imagined conversation between the athletes.
The Podcast's origins
Skeets soon moved his writing to a new website he created called “The Basketball Jones”. Drawing on his past experience with radio, Skeets decided to use the emerging medium of podcasting to produce a basketball-related talk show. He approached Melas and Doyle with the idea and together they worked out the tone and format of the show. When it debuted in January 2006, The Basketball Jones podcast was a half-hour program recorded weekly at Doyle’s house.[3] The show immediately gained a small, but dedicated following. As its popularity increased, the three began recording shows more frequently.
Each show consisted of segments dedicated to the on and off court happenings in the NBA separated by short musical breaks. Regular features included “Wanker of the Week”, in which the hosts highlighted an NBA player, coach, or executive guilty of committing a gaffe and “One-on-One”, in which the hosts took opposing views on a number of topics and argued over them in a “lightning-round” format. The show championed the “fan perspective” of sports reporting pioneered by ESPN’s Bill Simmons. It also paid special attention to the NBA “blogosphere”, a collection of bloggers who maintained web pages about their local teams. Many of these bloggers appeared on the show as experts on their particular team.
The full seasons
At the start of the ‘06 - ’07 season, The Basketball Jones was produced daily in a 15-minute version called “The Fix” and in a half-hour weekly round-up episode. “The Fix” was recorded remotely by Doyle and the hosts interacted with each other through Skype from their respective homes.[3] The group met on the weekend at Doyle’s residence to record the longer show.
Though the show’s audience grew, the three partners became unsatisfied with the poor audio quality yielded by recording the show over the Internet. During the ‘07 - ‘08 season, The Basketball Jones was recorded daily in a studio at Super Sonics Productions in downtown Toronto and produced as a 20 minute show. The improved sound quality, word of mouth, and Skeets’ growing popularity as a writer on Deadspin.com [1] brought more listeners, bouncing the show into iTunes’ top 100 most popular podcasts.[3] At this time, the website, thebasketballjones.net, registered approximately 60,000 page views per month.[3] Towards the end of the season, Skeets was hired by Yahoo! Sports to edit their basketball blog which he renamed, “Ball Don’t Lie”.[4]
For the ‘08 - ‘09 season the show became a video podcast and was filmed in a downtown apartment building. The length of the show was shortened to 15 minutes.[5] In addition to being available on thebasketballjones.net, the video podcast was also embedded daily on the Ball Don’t Lie website.
Matt Osten, a Montreal native and graduate of McGill University's Faculty of Law, officially joined The Basketball Jones at the start of the '09 - '10 season.
The Jones recorded a live 500th episode on January 15, 2010.
On March 1, 2010 The Jones proudly announced that they have officially joined The Score, a Canadian multi-media sports network.
Show format
Each podcast begins with Skeets announcing the number of the episode and the date followed by a random phrase (Ex: “More is not always better.”). After a brief introduction that displays the name of the podcast over the song “Napoleon Says” by Phoenix, Skeets begins each show with the greeting, “Good morning, sweet world!”. The hosts then switch off reading the daily headlines. Skeets introduces Melas and then Doyle to which he responds, “Hello!”.
Currently, the show is divided into one main talking segment followed by a shorter one that includes viewer’s questions, “The ‘Whoa Boy’ Fantasy Line of the Night”, and a feature in which the hosts compete at selecting winning teams based on gambling odds. Melas ends the show with a quote to which Skeets replies, “Sound advice.”
Skeets’ frequent malapropisms such as “The Internets” and mispronunciations such as Shane “Ba-ché”, Melas’ peculiar analogies, and Doyle’s eclectic musical selections are all hallmarks of the show.
During the podcast's first three seasons, Caroline Lesley, a New York-based actress introduced the show and recorded several interstitials that ran at the episode's breaks. She has not been incorporated into the video podcast.[5]
Related media work
Skeets’ writing has appeared on ESPN.com[6] and Deadspin.com.[7]
Melas has appeared as a pundit on Raptors NBA TV.
Doyle is the co-host and producer of “Idol Chatter”, a podcast about reality television. He has also done sound editing work for many animated television programs including Atomic Betty, Carl Squared, and Johnny Test.
The Basketball Jones has been featured on ESPN, The New York Times,[8] and The Globe and Mail.[3]
References
- ^ Mike Payne (April 11, 2008). "GearCrave Interview: The Basketball Jones". GearCrave.
- ^ a b Blogger Interviews: J.E. Skeets, The Big Picture, Friday, May 04, 2007
- ^ a b c d e Sam Toman & Andrew Chin (April 18, 2008). "These podcasters are a slam dunk".
- ^ "Ball Don't Lie", Yahoo Sports
- ^ a b http://thebasketballjones.net/post/57512457/a-peek-behind-the-curtain [dead link]
- ^ "TrueHoop Wants To Know …". October 25, 2007.
- ^ http://deadspin.com/tag/je-skeets/
- ^ Fred Bierman & Benjamin Hoffman (December 17, 2006). "PRO BASKETBALL; OFF THE DRIBBLE". The New York Times.
External links
- Official website
- Sam Toman (April 24, 2007). "Online rally: How Toronto Raptors fans used the Internet to stave off extinction". Macleans.ca.