Site Housekeeping: Holiday Edition

Merry Christmas and happy holidays, Brew Hoopers! With the regular season officially underway, we have a few things we want to present for your consideration. The schedule for the Milwaukee Bucks is even tighter than usual, so we’re seizing the opportunity that we have today.

Remember: Take Care of You and Yours

We’ve said it before but it bears repeating: we wouldn’t do what we do at Brew Hoop if it weren’t for the active participation from you, our readers and listeners. We thoroughly appreciate each and every one of you, and we want to keep this community worth coming back to.

So do your part, in your community. The COVID-19 pandemic has not yet subsided; news about the recently released vaccine is largely positive, but it’s still going to be a while before we can truly get “back to normal.” Having basketball to watch and analyze is a part of our normal, but fans can’t be in the stands and journalists in the locker room unless everybody does their part. Wear a mask, wash your hands, keep your distance, even if it’s hard. We’ll get through this, but only if we do it together.

Community Guidelines

When it comes to participating in this community, please ensure that anything posted on your account lives up to the SB Nation Community Guidelines. Brew Hoop has been one of the more stable communities across the network, and a big part of that is the responsibility and maturity demonstrated by those who choose to comment, discuss, and debate. Our goal is to maintain this forum as a place for constructive conversation, which does not mean that it has to be overwhelmingly positive or rampantly negative. People can feel however they want and should express those thoughts, but once it loses the “constructive” aspect of our site’s mandate, a post no longer fits what Brew Hoop is all about. As long as you’re bringing something to the table, this community is better for it!

Shift in Coverage Focus

We continually strive to better serve this community, so this season we’re making some slight changes to how we cover the Bucks. Hopefully these changes are for the better; we rely on you to let us know!

• Game Preview posts are being streamlined to make it easier for our writers to put together, while still collecting the relevant information from both teams in the contest.
• No, we’re not taking away the Pregame Poll. I learned my lesson in the Orlando bubble!
• Rapid Recaps are no longer going to include box score summaries; instead, we’ll link to a box score and focus more on the game’s flow, to better tell the story.
• Extended Recaps are going to include what might be the most important question of the Bucks’ regular season this year: what did we learn? No one regular season game will make or break the season but they should inform what this team looks like in the playoffs, and we want to maintain that focus all year long.
• As expected, we’re keeping our trademark “Three Things” and “Bonus Bucks Bits” sections.

Open Threads

By popular demand, we’re going to make a better effort to post open threads on days where the Bucks don’t have games, so that our community can follow the rest of the NBA in the same place we follow the Bucks.

Affiliate Links

You may have noticed this in our game coverage on Wednesday, but we’re including affiliate links at the bottom of our posts. As stated in the SB Nation Guiding Principles, Vox Media will enter into partnerships with advertisers and sponsors in order to support our network.

Some of SB Nation’s content contains affiliate links, which means we will receive a commission for purchases made via those links; when our editorial or commerce teams have manually added affiliate links to our articles, we will include a disclosure within the content.

Plainly stated, Brew Hoop gets a cut of the profits whenever users click through those links and make a purchase. They do not – and will not – affect the content, direction, or voice of our posts, but they help us get access to the resources that better support our staff’s efforts.

Help Wanted!

We here at Brew Hoop are always on the lookout for talent, and we’re always looking to add to our team. If you or someone you know is looking to get involved in covering the Bucks or the NBA, we want to hear about it! There are always opportunities to contribute as a writer, on our social media feeds, site moderation, and with our podcast operations. Let us know!

Suggestions?

We always enjoy hearing from you. If there’s something in this post you disagree with, a trend you see that you don’t like, or a new addition you want to read more often, there’s a number of methods to contact us. First and foremost, use the comments, which has the added benefit of allowing your fellow readers to add their thoughts or rec your post. You can also contact us on Twitter and via email at brewhoop@sbnation.com.

Again, we truly appreciate each of you, and we are glad that you’re with us for the long haul. Happy holidays, everyone!