Dan and I started PistonPowered from scratch in January, 2009 to very little fanfare. The site design was minimalist if you’d like to be polite, uninspired if you’re not feeling so generous. Content consisted primarily of newspaper round-ups and sparsely attended live blogs. Our readership was made up of a few friends and our moms, the latter of whom aren’t even basketball fans. Ensuring proper comment formatting was not a top priority.

Fast-forward eighteen months. Thanks to our inclusion in the TrueHoop Network, the recent addition of Patrick Hayes to our writing staff, and general practice at this stuff, we have more readers than ever before. Good readers who often challenge what we write and participate in (mostly) thoughtful discussion. And the comments are a mess.

Make no mistake, it’s our mess. In all this time, we’ve strived to constantly improve the blog, both with more in-depth coverage and new features. But for technical reasons, the comments have lagged behind. After a couple levels of replies, it becomes necessary to practically climb into the screen to follow along.

We’re currently in the middle of a major design overhaul that will soon solve these problems, but it’s not yet ready for prime-time. In the interim, to improve general readability, we’ve decided to disable nested comments. You’ll still be able to weigh in on all the action here at PistonPowered, just not directly reply to other comments.

I hope this temporary inconvenience won’t deter you from sharing your thoughts with us. We really do appreciate your participation here on the site. After all, it was nothing other than a comment that prompted us to make this change.

As always, if you have any suggestions on how to improve PistonPowered please contact us.

We’re very excited today to announce Patrick Hayes is joining PistonPowered. You might recognize Patrick from his excellent work at Full-Court Press. He will be writing regularly for this site now.

What this means for you

In the long term, better and more complete Pistons coverage (and probably the wrath of Patrick in the comments if your thoughts are nonsensical).

In the short term, Patrick has NBA TV and will be writing about the Pistons’ Summer League game against the Lakers tonight at 8 p.m. (Watch on ESPN 3.)

Patrick will contribute to the PistonPowered Twitter, and you can also follow him.

Again, we’re extremely happy to have Patrick on board.

Allow this post to serve as your open thread for tonight’s game.

In an ongoing effort to make the blog better and more user friendly, we’ve decided to make a few changes to the design here at PistonPowered.

For starters, we’ve scrapped the left sidebar completely and added a new menu bar at the top of the site. The right sidebar has gotten a little bigger, and there’s more room for the main content which should allow us to put up better charts, pictures, etc.

Things have been moved around a bit, so here’s a complete rundown of what’s different:

Menu Bar

Many of the items that used to be found in the left sidebar have moved to the top of the page, and we’ve added a few new pages as well.

• Login/Logout: This contains all account links, including registration, login, logout, and your profile page.
• Schedule/Results: A work in progress, this currently takes you to a list of all Game Previews and Reviews. We’re still figuring out the best way to display this information, so stay tuned for the final version.
• Roster: This is a new page consisting of all current and former Detroit Pistons that we’ve covered on the blog, including coaches. Each link will take you to that player’s Player Profile if they have one, and gives a list of recent posts tagged with that player’s name. The dropdown menu for Roster will list all current players and the head coach for easy access to their info. We almost forgot to include Kwame Brown in the list though. Close call.
• Salary Chart: Here you’ll be able to find a rundown of the Pistons’ salary obligations for the next few years, including player and team options. I have a feeling this might come in handy when the league is working on a new CBA in the near future.
• Archives: This is where you can find every post we’ve ever written. Scary, right? They’re broken up by both date and category, and you can always search to help you find exactly what you’re looking for.
• More PistonPowered: Can’t get enough? Here you’ll find links to our Facebook page, Twitter accounts, and RSS Feeds.
• About: This has some general information on PistonPowered, and a page for each of the blog’s authors where you can see recent posts, and all kinds of juicy personal details. Enter at your own risk.

Sidebar

• Other info from the now-defunct left sidebar has made the jump across the page to the other side. The site search, links to other sources for Pistons coverage, Feldman’s recent articles (even more recent than before!), and The Glove Compartment have all survived in tact.
• We’ve gotten some questions lately about where we get our data, so we’ve also added a few of our favorite NBA resources, including Basketball-Reference, Hoopdata, and BasketballValue. Hopefully some of you will find them at least a little bit useful.

Feedback

Feel free to poke around the site to get acquainted with the new layout. We’d love to hear any of your questions, concerns, or feedback, so go ahead and shoot us an email (pistonpowered[at]gmail[dot]com). All suggestions are welcome.

I’ll be chatting on Daily Dime Live during tonight’s game (at Phoenix, 8 p.m.). It’s always a good time, so join in.

For those readers out there who just can’t get enough of PistonPowered (and honestly, who can?), there’s yet another place you can go to get your fix. We’ve created a Fan Page on Facebook where you can and go to view regular blog posts as well as the contents of The Glove Compartment.

But wait! There’s more! Act now, and we’ll also throw in bonus community features including a discussion board and an exclusive Facebook Wall at no extra charge. Tell the world how you really feel about PistonPowered and become a fan today!

ESPN Chat

I’ll be joining Chris Broussard in a chat about the Pistons at 2 p.m. tomorrow. Join and ask some questions.

If you’re unavailable then, a transcript of the chat will be available here.

Previews

I’m also going to do individual player previews between now and the start of the season. They’re ordered by who I expected to have the biggest impact this season, from least to most.

I’ll also do a team preview and a bigger-picture look at the Pistons before the regular season starts.

Here’s a tentative schedule:

Oct. 14: Deron Washington

Oct. 15: Jonas Jerebko

Oct. 16: DaJuan Summers

Oct. 16: Chris Wilcox

Oct. 17: Austin Daye

Oct. 18: Jason Maxiell

Oct. 19: Kwame Brown

Oct. 19: Ben Wallace

Oct. 20: Will Bynum

Oct. 21: Charlie Villanueva

Oct. 22: Rodney Stuckey

Oct. 23: Tayshaun Prince

Oct. 24: Richard Hamilton

Oct. 25: Ben Gordon

Oct 26: Season preview

Oct. 27: State of the Pistons

Sorry for the lack of content the last few days, but I’ve had some computer troubles. I’m hoping to have it all squared away tomorrow.

And I’ll also try to have something up after tonight’s game.

Ngozika Nwaneri at PASPN.net has set up a mock GM league for PistonPowered readers, friends of PistonPowered readers and anyone else who signs up.

I’ve played this game a few years, and it’s great. Everyone comes up with trade ideas, and this is your chance to act on them.

Here’s a brief explanation:

This is the first fantasy basketball game that enforces the rules of the NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement. Participants can chose to either take over an NBA team as a General Manager (GM) or create an NBA sports management firm (Agent) for the purpose of managing the relationship between NBA players and the teams they play for. During the first half of the summer, GMs trade players and draft picks, decide team options, create draft boards and position themselves for the free agency period. The first half ends with the NBA Draft where GMs select college players for the up and coming season. The second half of the summer is the free agency period where Agents and GMs interact to negotiate contracts for players who are free agents, players who have been released, players looking for extensions from their rookie contract, etc. By October when other fantasy games are just starting, you would have already assembled your fantasy teams for Head-to-Head (GMs) or Rotisserie (Agents) competition for the upcoming NBA Regular season.

More information is available at the league’s home page.

You can pick your team Thursday at 4 p.m. here.

And thanks to Ngozika for putting all of this together.

Sorry the posting has been slow. I was out of town this weekend, and I’m very busy with work this week.

But there should be more posts the next few days than the last few (especially if you count this post, which already puts me ahead of the last few days).

It can be easy to get excited about something new and jump into it with both feet first. Unfortunately, this often comes with the side effect of rushing in before giving the idea too much thought.

This is exactly what happened with delicious and Twitter here at PistonPowered. After adding both features to the site, we quickly realized that there wasn’t much delicious could do that Twitter couldn’t. So it got the axe.

Now, links and minor updates that don’t warrant their own post will be posted to @PistonPowered. In addition, we created another Twitter account called @PPFeed that uses twitterfeed to display all our posts.

This means it’s possible to view all content from PistonPowered exclusively via Twitter. (Don’t worry. You won’t miss out on anything by just visiting the site. All Tweets will be posted under “The Glove Compartment” on the left side of the page.)

We think this is a good set-up, but obviously it’s subject to change. I’ll keep you posted.

NOTE: Some of you may have already figured all this out. We made these changes a few weeks back, but I put off posting about it until now. My apologies.