Hoopsmachine: A 14-Year Journey to Build the Basketball News Experience I Always Wanted
The first time I tried to build Hoopsmachine was in 2012.
I loved basketball—NBA, college, international—but keeping up with it all was exhausting. Dozens of bookmarks. Twitter lists. RSS feeds. And still, I’d miss stories. Trades would break while I was in meetings. Analysis I would have loved got buried under hot takes.
So I started building something to fix it. Then life happened. I shelved it.
The Itch That Wouldn’t Go Away
Over the next decade, I kept coming back to the idea. Different tech stacks. Different approaches. A weekend project here, a late-night coding session there. Each iteration taught me something, but none shipped.
Part of it was the problem itself: aggregating news is easy. Aggregating it well is hard. But the bigger factor was time. Running Pagecloud has always been my priority, and it’s the kind of work that doesn’t leave much room for ambitious side projects. Anything that requires sustained focus over months or years just couldn’t compete.
Still, I couldn’t let the idea go. Anyone can pull RSS feeds and dump links on a page. But that’s not curation—that’s a fire hose. I wanted something smarter. Something that understood when multiple outlets were covering the same story. Something that could surface what matters and let the noise fade.
I wanted Techmeme, but for basketball.
What Hoopsmachine Actually Is
Hoopsmachine is a real-time basketball news aggregator covering everything: NBA, WNBA, NCAA, G League, international leagues—all of it. Here’s what makes it different:
Intelligent clustering. When a trade breaks, you don’t need 47 separate links saying the same thing. Hoopsmachine groups coverage together, showing you the primary source and related reporting in one place.
Curated by robots. The system watches over 100 sources around the clock, using embeddings and similarity matching to understand what’s being covered. No manual curation. No editorial bias. Just algorithms doing what they do best—processing information at scale.
Everything in one place. Stop bouncing between ESPN, The Athletic, team blogs, and Twitter. Hoopsmachine brings it all together so you can actually enjoy being a basketball fan again.
Why Now?
After all these years, the pieces finally came together. Better embedding models. Cheaper infrastructure. Tools that let a solo developer build what used to require a team.
I’m not building this to compete with sports media giants. I’m building it because I still have that same frustration from 2012—and I know I’m not alone.
Coming Soon
Hoopsmachine is launching soon. If you want to be notified when it goes live, sign up at hoopsmachine.com.
No spam. Just one email when we’re ready.
If you run a basketball news site and want to get your coverage into Hoopsmachine, drop me a line at hi@hoopsmachine.com.
After 14 years of false starts, it’s time to ship.
Basketball news, curated by robots.