September 2, 2011
Reading Material
A Prospectus Book Update

Basketball Prospectus

Ah, the start of September, where a young man's thoughts can't help but drift to ... basketball? Oh, we're following the start of that other sport with the pigskin, but at Basketball Prospectus it's always basketball season. We're starting to think about the upcoming season and we hope you are too, which is why we wanted to offer an update on the status of our annual books.

As you may have noticed, a month before training camps are scheduled to open, we still don't know when or even if the NBA will be back to work. As a result, we also don't know when you'll see a Pro Basketball Prospectus 2011-12 While work is already under way on what is tentatively scheduled to be this year's book, we can't very well release an annual about a season that doesn't happen.

Right now, our plan is to follow a similar playbook to the one used by our colleagues and friends at Football Outsiders. At the conclusion of the NFL Lockout, they hustled to update rosters and player comments before releasing the latest edition of the Football Outsiders Almanac a little later than usual but well before the start of the regular season. We hope to do something similar and will keep you up to date on that timeline as it takes shape.

Thanks for your patience as we deal with a scenario that is new for most all of us. After all, during the 1998 lockout, Kevin didn't yet have an email address, let alone a Twitter account.
Kevin Pelton and Bradford Doolittle

Fortunately the upcoming college season is a little more definite. There will be one, and so there will of course be a College Basketball Prospectus 2011-12. This marks our fourth year of trumpeting that ours is the "essential" guide to the men's college basketball season. To live up to such a lofty adjective while previewing every team in Division I (even the independents!), we've called a meeting of the five tempo-free families: Ken Pomeroy, Kevin Pelton, Drew Cannon, John Ezekowitz, Asher Fusco, Dan Hanner, Mike Portscheller, Josh Reed ... Whatever their day jobs may be and wherever else they may write, this legendary gang somehow eludes the paparazzi and gets together each fall to bring you the definitive reality-based and hype-free preview of the upcoming season.

This year's book will include:

• Previews of every D-I team.
• The unveiling of Pomeroy's preseason rankings. Get them here before they appear on his site.
• An in-depth historical investigation by yours truly into perhaps the single most influential college basketball artifact of the last three decades. And that's all I'm saying right now. I don't want Charles Robinson to scoop me.
• The latest in a series of illustrious annual surprise guests. Recall that last year Brad Stevens contributed our Foreword. Well, the identity of this year's guest star is still a secret, but let's just say he too took a team very deep into last year's tournament. (No, not Jim Calhoun.)

Watch this space for updates on our anticipated release date. See you in the fall!
John Gasaway