So I started this project over at my own website, whereby I try and marry my two great passions: long form improvisation and professional basketball.

In either basketball or improv, players must cooperate to be successful. When it all comes together, the result is awe inspiring and magical. A few examples:

- Most teams have 15 players on their roster but they really only run a 9 or 10 man rotation which is about the number of people you have on a Harold team.

- Both have coaches who stress fundamentals and playing as a unit but really the big job is handling multiple personalities at once.

- Both involve a certain amount of organized chaos. Both have warm-ups.

- Both stress sharing as an integral part of success; in basketball, it’s called “passing” and in improv, it’s called “sharing the focus”.

- Both follow a basic set of rules but with numerous permutations (Basketball: Princeton Offense, Triangle Offense, Run and Shoot, etc. Improv: Harold, Deconstruction, Armando, etc.)

- Both have their superstars but a team really doesn’t become great or achieve anything of note unless it has really selfless role players.

- Both require, depend on and are affected greatly by the number of butts in the seats.

And there is an amazing amount of preparation that goes into both for what is essentially a finite amount of time that happens on a small square piece of wood.

Ultimately, in either arena, you are going to have various levels of ability but as long as you know the basic rules, you can play the game anywhere in the world.

Now, I understand that writing about improv and how it relates to professional basketball is an extremely niche area that may only relate to a very small sub-set of the human race, but the “secret” to blogging, or so I’ve read, is to find that one thing that you are truly passionate about and write about it.

So even if you are not someone who cares about professional basketball (or vice versa, improv), I encourage you to give this series a look because what I really care about is the human drama that is involved behind the scenes and how it affects the play on the court/stage; i.e. chemistry.

There will be no math involved. There will not be a test. But there will be a lot of frank discussion on the group mind that needs to go into both improv and professional basketball.

I’m hoping to find, more than anything else, the truth as that is what we should be striving for every time one steps on stage.

Thanks for reading.

NOTE: I chose professional basketball, as opposed to say, just plain old basketball for a few reasons.

1) I wanted a finite end to this project for the reader’s sake and mine. I could easily ramble on about a larger discussion of improv vs. basketball for years.

2) The NBA is the absolute best basketball played in the world; in improv, you strive for excellence, if not perfection. The exclusivity of the NBA not only provides a context for “excellence” but it also narrows the discussion down to a workable size for comparison.

3) All of these players and their histories are easily recognized and able to be researched. I don’t want to talk out of my ass about a guy who plays for Moscow CSKA because I can’t find enough data about him and you don’t want to find yourself saying, “Wait: Why the hell am I reading about a benchwarmer for a Russian team in the Euroleague? It’s nice outside.”

Deal? Cool.

If you would like to read the first entry about my beloved Chicago Bulls, you can go here.

And if you would like to read from a professional sport website (and see how I correctly predicted this would happen) you can go here.

Enjoy!