Goodbye Grantland, I'll miss you

Friday, ESPN announced that they were shutting down the sports and pop culture website Grantland, via tweet, and were reassigning the majority (but not all) of their team to other ventures within ESPN.  The World Wide Leader in sports apparently had had enough of the underground-bordering-on-popular website founded by the recently ousted Bill Simmons, and its takes on everything from college football and the NBA to trending movies and music.  The closure of Grantland removes a number of really good writers and podcasters from the limelight, and it is truly a loss for all of us.

Forget for a moment the pop culture stories that were entertaining at worst, and mockingly witty at best, and look at the best that Grantland had to offer in terms of sports coverage - Zach Lowe.  For even the casual NBA fan, Zach was something of a hoops savant, with both advanced stats and his own opinions mixing freely into writing.  This made for not only a very interesting read, but you could even learn a thing or two while you were at it.  The concepts of "pace and space" and the value of the efficiency of certain types of shots (3s, free throws, and layups for example) were very clearly laid out in Zach's writing, so that someone who was a novice could gain a lot of insight, but also someone who was steeped in the game could also benefit from his observations.

The articles led eventually to a spot on the Grantland Basketball Hour, and that then led to the podcast known as "the Lowe Post" which featured guests from all over the NBA gamut, including current and former coaches Stan and Jeff Van Gundy, other writers like Howard Beck, and ESPN sports personalities such as Kevin Arnovitz and Mark Stein.  Each pod felt like its own entity, with the tangent topics sometimes taking over the conversation for minutes at a time.  Zach took the hour and change to talk about whatever the heck he wanted to talk about, and it always felt less like a podcast and more like we were listening in on his telephone conversation with these other folks.  It sometimes rambled but never left you feeling like you wasted your time listening, and it was mostly just like a real extension of Zach's writing verbalized and recorded for others to check out.  And now all of it suddenly, abruptly, and perhaps foolishly, its all just gone.

Kirk Goldsberry was the master of the shot chart and Juliet Littman and Andrew Sharp sounded the alarm on the regular for the NBA After Dark.  Andy Greenwald had great pop culture and TV show takes.  The list of smart, funny, and talented contributors could go on and on - but it won't.  Is it more about their beef with Bill Simmons himself than the fact that Disney is forcing ESPN (who owns them) to cut millions of dollars from the budget?  One would like to think that such a decision wouldn't be based on emotional reasons, but this is one that surely feels like it.  My sadness at Grantland's passing isn't nearly as bad as those who used to write for them surely.  But the world is now a lesser place for not having Grantland in it.  

So goodbye Grantland, I'll miss you.  If its any consolation, I'm not the only one.