Introducing: Silver Screen and Roll

For those of you who follow and comment regularly on my work here at Respect Kobe, you’ve come to expect to hear from me every now and then, at best. My last article came about a month and a half ago, a discussion of the Lakers without Andrew Bynum.

That’s about to change.

Effective immediately, I’ve signed on as the Lakers blogger for SB Nation. You can find my brand new Lakers blog, called Silver Screen and Roll (hat tip to Matt at Hardwood Paroxysm for the name), at SilverScreenAndRoll.com.

How will this affect my work here at Respect Kobe? Very little. I still plan to post occasional Kobe Bryant-related articles here, probably about as often as I did before. But unlike my work here at Respect Kobe, I will be posting on a very regular basis over at Silver Screen and Roll.

That brings me to a point I want to make regarding the differences between Respect Kobe and Silver Screen and Roll. I alluded to this distinction briefly in my introductory post at Silver Screen and Roll, and I want to explain it a bit more in depth here.

While I don’t actually consider Respect Kobe to be a blog, in the truest sense, it put me in contact with several other bloggers and introduced me to the wonderful world of sports blogging.

Though Respect Kobe is laid out like a blog and built on blogging software, I don’t actually consider it a blog, nor have I really considered myself a blogger for the last couple years. Instead, to me, this website was simply started as a centralized location for addressing the broader Kobe Bryant discussion in some sort of semi-organized fashion. The fact that I chose to do so using blogging software, to me, was coincidental. The blog itself was simply a venue; the website, in reality, was really just a place for me to write occasional articles relating to issues that I felt needed to be better explored than they were at various other places across these internets.

Perhaps the most elucidating question to ask in all of this is, Why did I start Respect Kobe? After all, some have questioned the validity of a site dedicated to a single player.

(Sidenote: To anyone who questions the validity of a player-specific website, I challenge you to tell me what it is about a team, as opposed to a player, that makes it inherently more worthy of a devoted website. I would suggest that there is no inherent feature or trait that applies to teams but not players, which makes the team worthy of a devoted website but not the player. In fact, a sports team is every bit as trivial and inconsequential, in the grand scheme of Things That Matter, as a sports player. Thus, it is my contention that the determining factor in deciding whether a devoted website is merited is demand. Simply put, do people want to read about the proposed topic? Is there demand for a website devoted to that topic? If people want to read about it, then it is valid to write about it. And I think we can all agree that there is high demand for Kobe Bryant-related content. End mini-rant.)

The answer is simple: I started this site because the debate that rages in comments and message boards across the internet is poorly articulated, completely unorganized, and often chock full of errors. Part of that is simply because the range of topics that relate to the greatear Kobe Bryant discussion is so broad that no single conversation — be it at a bar, in the comments of an ESPN.com article, or on any message board across the internet — can account for every issue. So instead of intelligent discussion and forward-moving analysis, we end up with a tired list of ineffective arguments, constantly being rehashed and recycled by angry fans and haters across the web.

It is also a fact that many of the arguments made for or against Kobe Bryant in these wide-ranging internet discussions are simply incorrect — and the “Yuh-HUH! Nuh-UH!!” discussions that tend to result when discussing Kobe Bryant are no place to intelligently and effectively correct such misinformation.

So Respect Kobe was born, with the purpose of addressing the Kobe Bryant discussion in a way that is complete and comprehensive, intelligent, and organized. The idea, from the outset, has been that one day, when all of the important topics had been addressed, a comprehensive, intelligent, well-informed and well-articulated discussion of Kobe Bryant could be found on this website, which could become a resource to those discussing Kobe Bryant in other places across the interweb.

Respect Kobe is not a blog — and that is what is different about Silver Screen and Roll, which certainly is a blog. As such, it will be updated frequently. While Respect Kobe contains primarily in-depth articles, many of which require extensive research and quite a bit of time to write, Silver Screen and Roll will contain content of every type — from simple links to in depth analysis, and everything in between.

So you’ll be hearing a lot more from me — and hopefully, that’s a good thing.

On another note, a few of you have been pretty active in the comments here at Respect Kobe. In my introductory post at Silver Screen and Roll, I mentioned that I’ll be looking for some guest writers. If that’s something you’ll be intersted, get to work in the comments and via SB Nation’s very cool FanPost feature at Silver Screen and Roll.

If you’ve arrived here via Silver Screen and Roll, and are new to Respect Kobe, check out the About page, where I’ve expanded a bit more on the purpose and goal of this website.

If you’re a regular Respect Kobe reader who hasn’t yet been to Silver Screen and Roll… what are you waiting for? Get over there, sign up, and become a member of what I hope will become one of the best team blogs on the internet!