Search for a good Jazz fan site pays off

By Michael Sharp

It's November, which to my wife means month-long Thanksgiving cooking preparations, but to me signifies the start of basketball season, and more specifically Jazz basketball season.

What a great time to be a Jazz fan. They are coming off a season that saw them in the Western Conference Finals. With a talented young core of players, the Jazz look to have a bright future ahead of them. So I decided that this year I would try to find a place on the Internet that I could go and get the latest info on the team, as well as opinions from other fans. I wanted somewhere that I could spill out my own witty remarks on to a computer screen and have people tell me what they thought. I wanted to find a Utah Jazz fan site.

I didn't realize that I would not only find one fan site, but tons of sites that popped up as I Google searched, "Utah Jazz fan site," and swept my way through each site's corresponding zillions of links. I decided to take out my figuratively oversized Sherlock Holmes type magnifying glass and do some detective work on the best Jazz fan site on the web. I picked the 5 most representative fan sites to discuss in this column.

The first website I went to was The Utah Jazz Rule fan site. I was shocked that such a clever name for a website resulted in such an ugly web layout on my computer screen. It had a black and white background, with the Jazz logo tiled across the whole page. It had several small links on the left side and I decided to click on "Current Roster." It only took me enough time to see headshots of Karl Malone, John Stockton, and Jeff Hornacek to realize that this site had not been update in quite awhile. I soon found out that there are many similar sites still lurking about on the web, waiting for the unsuspecting Jazz fan to waste time looking at a 9 year old webpage

I also surfed my way to several legitimate websites including the Jazz Hoops fan site. This site was not too flashy, but had a very comprehensive news column section on the right hand side. I quickly noticed that there were nine different article links in this section written about the Jazz-Houston game by both Utah and Houston newspapers. Although this site had by far the most comprehensive news coverage, the links looked as if a 13-year-old boy, who was part blind, organized them. I looked at some of the bloggers that posted on the site and was surprised to see such in depth blogs, where some of them even had personal interviews with Jazz players. I then tried to join their message board by clicking on the link, and was extremely put off by the message that followed, telling me that the board was closed for private members only. This snobby attitude forced me to click the x on the corner of the screen immediately and move on to the next site.

One of the cooler websites was the Utah Jazz news fan site. Although this site had very little news, for example only one link for an article on the Jazz-Rockets game, on the right hand side it had an eBay watcher that tracked tickets for Jazz games being sold on e-bay. I thought that this was pretty sweet, and envisioned myself regularly going to this site and finding smokin' deals on extremely cheap tickets that I would bid on and come home to my wife mad that I spent our money on seats we couldn't use since we were obliged to see her nephew in the school play or something like that. The site then gave me the option of becoming a blogger on the site, which I couldn't pass up. It was pretty easy as well, I just had to give them my e-mail address and they shot me an e-mail that had a link where I created a username and password. I was then ready to make blogging magic. However, as I read what the other bloggers on the site had to say, most of their blogs had nothing to do with the Jazz. I was disappointed and decided to move on to the next site.

The Jazzfanz.com fan site was a pleasant surprise. I'm not sure if I would prefer their name to have two z's on the word fans. The homepage had a calendar with upcoming Jazz games, which is nice. It also had everything else I would want on the homepage. It had organized links to Deseret News and Tribune articles; it had links to Yahoo box scores from the games as well as pertinent stories from newspapers around the nation. It also had a very well organized message board. I decided to sign up. I only had to give them my e-mail address, and then create a username and password and am now known on their message board as "loganfan." I did discover that their links page is severely outdated, but that is about the only negative thing I could find to complain about from this website.

A very different kind of fan site is the Jazzbots website. This is a broad spectrum Jazz blog site, where a community of bloggers, called jazzbots, write about the Jazz. The community includes everyone from sports reporters on TV and from newspapers, to housewives, businessmen, and college students. For the most part the blogs are very well done, and it was fun to get different perspectives from the varied bloggers. The registration was interesting, with questions like "2+3=?" but it was short. I almost filled it out until I realized that I wasn't sure what I was signing up for. You don't sign up to be a blogger, those guys are already set, but you become a reader? You can read all the jazzbot blogs without signing up, so I didn't see the point, except to get more e-mails.

After tired eyes let me know that my search for my Utah Jazz fan site should be over, I was content to know that I will be able to have a happy basketball season as I surf through my favorite fan site, Jazzfanz.com. I realize however that everybody is looking for something different in their fan site, and so I present the list of bests for Jazz fan sites.

Best Overall - Jazzfanz.com
Best pure information site - Utah Jazz History (Incredible up to date history, statistics and information)
Best Community Blog site - Jazzbots
Best individual blog site - Jazz Crap (season ticket holder that takes pictures and gives his opinions for all the games)
Best Media site - Salt Lake Tribune (well organized, good articles, and even an expert blog)
Most Potential - Jazzbball (best layout and user friendly, not a lot of information yet)

NW
JJ