My favorite internet sources !

PARIS (The Monday International Show) - Viewers often ask me where I get my info and anecdotes to prepare and to renew the content for my TV commentary of about 170 games a year!

After being reticent at the start, as with mobile phones( I guess I'm showing my age here), I've become an internet addict spending at least 3 hours a day on the web for personal or professional reasons.

Since I work out of Paris, this gives me access to the media who are closest to the action on a daily basis.

Of course, I prefer it when I cover Euroleague games, NBA finals or the Olympics live and on site because we can do our research ourselves.

When I started this job 21 years ago we only had a few newspapers and magazines to refer to for NBA info but now the net has changed the situation drastically!

Since I'm a big believer in the sharing of free flowing information, here's a list of my favorite internet sources.

The institutional sites like fiba.com, nba.com or euroleague.net are useful for that stat, player or old record you've been searching for.

For more critical and daring commentary hoopshype.com is a Spanish site that regroups excerpts and rumors from worldwide media concerning basketball which is an excellent journalistic preselection tool that saves us alot of time surfing around the globe!

The best US sports site is, in my opinion, espn.com which despite being a big corporate partner of the NBA gives its wide array of specialists the freedom to criticize in a constructive manner.

They have overtaken Sports Illustrated(which has a good international expert in Ian Thomson), in this modern internet era.

Espn's page 2 star, Bill Simmons, is a pure product of this era and the funniest writer on the web especially if you like partying, gambling, Boston sports teams and US TV shows and movies!

Even if you don't, no worries, he's got an opinion on everything except international basketball which he leaves to his collegue, Chad Ford.

These two are often wrong in their analyses but they are often on the money too!

The omnipresent Marc Stein, who is a big Nowitski fan like me, has an irritating way of always bringing the story back to himself so I prefer writers like Henry Abbott and his "true hoops"(who agrees with me that Toronto's success announces the imminent arrival of alot of european brains to the NBA), or Greg Anthony and Kiki Vandeweghe who are the best of the former players or executives on espn.com.

Kobe fan, Ric Bucher gets some good LA scoops while Chris Sheridan is more east coast and didn't particularly distinguish himself at the world championships with his Argentinian"odorgate"!

Writers like Simmons and Abbott are champs at proposing interesting links to other content, too.

Another espn.com expert is numbers crunching stat geek, John Hollinger, who is on the insider pay portion of the site which I refuse to subscribe to by principle!

As far as the beat writers that I follow closely on the net go, I really enjoy reading Mike Wise(he is!) and Michael Lee of the Washington Post, I appreciate keeping up with Tony P thanks to the San Antonio press and the news on Diaw from the Phoenix media but I'm less convinced by the old school orneriness of Charly Rosen, a Phil Jackson buddy, on Fox sports.com or Peter Vecsey of the New York Post.

These two Rupert Murdoch employees certainly don't pull any punches nor look to make alot of freinds!

Other legends of basketball writing like Bob Ryan in Boston or Sam Smith in Chicago seem to have lost their influence now that their local teams are less dominating.

Another source of fresh info is the US TV commentary that I listen to simultaneously while announcing the games from Paris in the middle of the night.

The best tandem is Steve Kerr and the eternal Marv Albert who keep us informed and entertained which isn't as easy as most viewers think!

The worst tandems are the biased, local NBA commentateurs named by the teams who are more marketing agents than anything else but that's a whole other journalistic existentialism issue I'll deal with in a future article!

Let me finish by tipping my hat to two broadcasting legends, Chick Hearn and John Madden, that I have unabashedly copied throughout my career by importing to France alot of their catchy phrases and expressions.

George Eddy