Hello friends, we’ve got some important news to share with everybody about the future of (D)Roses and Thorns and some exciting professional news for Jake Weiner and myself.
Jake and I have accepted offers to write for SBNation’s Blog a Bull for the upcoming season. We are incredibly excited for this opportunity to write for a website we’ve been such huge fans of for so long and work alongside writers we’ve come to admire and respect. We’d like to offer a big thank you to Your Friendly BullsBlogger for this chance.
Making this decision was not an easy for us at it signifies the end of our time writing here. Building (D)Roses and Thorns together has been an incredible journey that has been far more rewarding than we ever could have imagined when I wrote the inaugural post back in May of 2013. In the last three and a half years, we’ve made tremendous development both as writers and observers of basketball. Through trial and error we’ve built the blog into something we’re incredibly proud of. And we’ve had a ton of fun.
The site would not be what it is today without huge contributions from Steven Kerstein, Drew Hackman, Jared Wyllys, Jason Schwartz, Jeff Berest and Tyler Geocaris. We’d like to express our gratitude to all the other contributors we’ve had over the years as well.
Steven’s meteoric rise to YouTube stardom brought a ton of exposure to the site that we all greatly benefited from. While most of his writing here was related to gambling, Steve penned probably my favorite player profile we’ve ever ran on this website.
Geo hasn’t written often here, but he was an important member in our founding and is always a great person to bounce ideas off of. He also wrote the most viewed article in the history of DRaT.
Drew, Jared, Jeff and Jason came onboard later and gave us the stability to really turn this website into a consistent source for news and analysis. We proudly wrote game recaps after all 82 Bulls games last season and provided frequent deep dives into specific players and team-wide trends.
I want to extend my sincerest gratitude to all of you reading this post. We greatly appreciate all of our friends who have read, liked, shared and told others about any of the articles we’ve ran on the site. There’s no better feeling than when an acquaintance comes up to me to let me know they’ve enjoyed something I wrote.
While Jake and I will be moving on from the website, we want to make sure you know that this site is not going to vanish from the Internet. We are going to leave the site in the hands of Jason Schwartz, who’s expressed great excitement about the chance to build upon the foundation we’ve created. Jason, who wrote for the Daily Illini before graduating this past May, most recently covered a wild draft night for the Bulls organization. Jason has been a friend of mine for several years and I know he will deliver the type of thoughtful analysis you’ve come to expect from (D)Roses and Thorns.
-Jacob Bikshorn, founder of (D)Roses and Thorns
It’s been an absolute honor editing and writing at (D)Roses and Thorns these last three and a half years. I can’t imagine finding a better or more consistently fun environment for me to grow both as a writer and editor. DRaT would’ve been nothing without the support of all our friends and readers, so again we want to sincerely thank everyone who’s ever read even one post at our blog.
As most of you hopefully already know, DRaT namesake Derrick Rose is currently embroiled in a civil case alleging that he gang raped a former girlfriend. Regardless of who is running this website, it will be committed to the human aspect of life as more important than basketball or fandom. As such, we have no choice but to change the name of the blog.
Even if Rose has been falsely accused (a conclusion that far too many are reaching without carefully considering a lot of seemingly relevant and gut-wrenching evidence against the former Bull), the situation has taught us at the blog an important lesson. We don’t know the athletes we root for. They are not our friends.
With that being said, we are taking name suggestions for the next incarnation of this blog. As hopefully made clear above, we are going to avoid using the name of another player, as amusing as many of your suggestions have been. So please, reach out to any of us individually or on Facebook and Twitter with any ideas.
It’s undoubtedly bittersweet leaving this website we’ve spent the last few years building up, but I know that Jason is the right person to continue providing the high quality Bulls goods that you all crave. Furthermore, I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to join the Blog a Bull team that we’ve long respected.
Jacob (@OldManBikshorn) and I (@JakeWeinerNBA) will be as active as ever on Twitter, and I’ll probably still hack into the @DRosesandThorns account from time to time as well (name change pending, of course). Thank you so much for joining us on this journey, and for coming along with both us and this blog as we venture out into an unknown future. Hey, the outlook has to be brighter than the Bulls’, right?
-Jake Weiner, co-founder and editor of (D)Roses and Thorns
The BULLetin Board 