OT: What is the history of RealGM?

[KrAzY3]

Early 2000s, there was no social media, just forums. ESPN had their own which was the most popular. Fans from different teams were fighting eachother all the time, it was glorious. Then they shut them down for what I presume to be costs because they had quite literally millions of posts.

Yeah I used to use the ESPN forums.

In this era it is really hard to fathom how and why ESPN decided to give up all that traffic though. If it still existed now, you'd think it would have been expanded and try to launch a broader social media platform. I wonder how much they spend for ads on other people's platforms now...

[Doctor MJ]

Well it been almost 20 years now, and I regret posting and modding as much as I did. Oh well… going to go back on leave.

Well, I’m glad to know you.


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[Boardbreaker]

Am I remembering wrong or didn’t the draftexpress guys start off as posters/contributors here?

[Doctor MJ]

Funny part is there were several users who joined RealGM strictly because of the Off-Topic board. I believe it got too out of hand drawing so many non-sports posters that RealGM decided to make the OT Board private so as the reduce lurkers who weren't posters. I could be wrong, though.

Sorta true but not exactly the story. I believe you reference the Other Off Topic Board known as the OOTB of TOOTBH. It wasn’t because of popularity it was closer to an Illuminati thing. Rumors were they were always influencing these boards and even got into some government and NBA team offices. It truly was the bohemian garden of posting.

My impression from those Prerak chose to invite to that board - hosted on the defunct Draft City site - is that there really wasn’t enough critical mass to keep the site must-check.

Of course, maybe that’s just how the Illuminati kept its secrecy.


(Disclosure: I was around and prominent enough it would have made sense for me to be invited, but was not invited. On a possibly related note, Prerak said some things that very much gave me the impression I annoyed him.

Also, just because it occurs to me to say:

The way I talk about Prerak and Tyler would give the impression they were older than I am, but this isn’t the case. I’m the old guy there, but they were mods here when I was a “ball boy”.)


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[Doctor MJ]

anyone remember when Johnathan Tjarks from RealGM asked Westbrook a question? I forget his response but it was funny

Jonathan Tsharks, realgm. Did they win this game or did you lose this game?

What? Bruh nah I’m out man. This n***** trippin

What posters became professionals, as far as we know?
It's very likely that I am not associating nickname and actual name, but I can think Givony, Snelling, Taylor... whoelse?

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I believe TrueLAFan has done some consulting for NBA teams. Forgetting his real name at the moment, but to me when I joined RealGM, he was the gold standard.

When he posted, you needed to read it.


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[Doctor MJ]

Early 2000s, there was no social media, just forums. ESPN had their own which was the most popular. Fans from different teams were fighting eachother all the time, it was glorious. Then they shut them down for what I presume to be costs because they had quite literally millions of posts.

Yeah I used to use the ESPN forums.

In this era it is really hard to fathom how and why ESPN decided to give up all that traffic though. If it still existed now, you'd think it would have been expanded and try to launch a broader social media platform. I wonder how much they spend for ads on other people's platforms now...

Great point.

ESPN’s vision was limited definitely, and yet still better than basically any other sports media company.

It’s probably hard to believe for younger folks, but there was a time when it made more sense for magazines to invest in the Internet than TV channels - which I think makes perfect sense when you think about it, but I think clearly TV channels ended up successfully grabbing more cyberspace real estate.


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[Doctor MJ]

Am I remembering wrong or didn’t the draftexpress guys start off as posters/contributors here?

Yup, Prerak and Jonathan Givony started here and created Draft City, then Givony formed Draft Express (I went through the story earlier in the thread).

Other Express writers definitely posted on here too.


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[Optimus_Steel]

Early 2000s, there was no social media, just forums. ESPN had their own which was the most popular. Fans from different teams were fighting eachother all the time, it was glorious. Then they shut them down for what I presume to be costs because they had quite literally millions of posts.

Yeah I used to use the ESPN forums.

In this era it is really hard to fathom how and why ESPN decided to give up all that traffic though. If it still existed now, you'd think it would have been expanded and try to launch a broader social media platform. I wonder how much they spend for ads on other people's platforms now...

Except for a handful of posters the place was a cesspool and there was a lot of bullying, racism, sexism, etc, along with just insane points made that made no sense and extreme hyperbolic points. I think ESPN thought it was too much of a hassle to have moderators moderate so they just closed shop.

[Michael Jackson]

Prerak - to my knowledge - never did anything ambitious with basketball again (I believe he was about to go to med school when he made this decision).

Law school. He would later -- and I swear I'm not making this up -- go on to serve as chief of staff for Ted Cruz.

Holy crap! I had no idea…yet I could see it.


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Tim just just saw this looks like Pre went back private this October

https://www.gibsondunn.com/lawyer/shah-prerak/#admissions-section

[BigGargamel]

Am I remembering wrong or didn’t the draftexpress guys start off as posters/contributors here?

Yup, Prerak and Jonathan Givony started here and created Draft City, then Givony formed Draft Express (I went through the story earlier in the thread).

Other Express writers definitely posted on here too.


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Dang. Imagine birthing Givony, then winding up with Colin McGowan. Ouch.

[Sedale Threatt]

it was really bad, then tsherkin finally left
now its okay

Was he that bad? i remember people talking about him but i was never a big GB poster

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So, let me say some stuff about Tyler Sherkin, because he deserves some Prerak-type love.

Tyler was extremely knowledgeable and could post incredibly quickly (like Prerak). Fast mind.

He was one of the key people in the Player Comparisons board culture as we developed it in the 00s. Any project, he’d be involved and he’d be a powerhouse.

I didn’t always see eye to eye with him, but lots of others can say that about me, so no shade there. Iron sharpens iron, as they say, and I certainly learned as a result of my interactions with him.

I don’t know what happened with him. I hope he’s okay. To my knowledge, he just disappeared. (Prerak by contrast made clear that he was going to stop posting.) if memory serves, he’d be nearing 40 now, so if anything bad happened to him, we’re not talking about normal human aging.

I wish him well.

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He was just so, soooooooooooooooooooo insufferable though. You're right, we're probably all know-it-alls in our own way. For example, in my "civilian" life I almost never run into anybody who knows as much about the NBA as I do -- I'm not sure if this is something to brag about -- so it's hard not to develop even a tiny smidge of superiority over that. Then you come here and realize you might not even be in the 20th or 30th percentile, if that.

You're definitely not any worse than I've seen; far from it. And I will give you a ton of credit in that I frequently see you offering olive branches whenever you feel like you've overdone it. You are an adult.

In contrast to him, who just tripled and quadrupled down. I didn't interact with him much, but I remember the last straw being him insisting that he'd watched all of Magic Johnson's 1,096 career games in their entirety. Which is a patently ridiculous claim, for any number of reasons. I didn't even really care, but I remember calling him out on it and it just turned into some ridiculous back-and-forth for a full afternoon. And that was just a drop in the bucket of overall interactions I saw him have with people.

It's hard to respect somebody like that, even if probably the ultimate reason I didn't like him is that I recognized things in him that I don't like about myself. (You spot it, you got it and all of that.)

[Michael Jackson]

Funny part is there were several users who joined RealGM strictly because of the Off-Topic board. I believe it got too out of hand drawing so many non-sports posters that RealGM decided to make the OT Board private so as the reduce lurkers who weren't posters. I could be wrong, though.

Sorta true but not exactly the story. I believe you reference the Other Off Topic Board known as the OOTB of TOOTBH. It wasn’t because of popularity it was closer to an Illuminati thing. Rumors were they were always influencing these boards and even got into some government and NBA team offices. It truly was the bohemian garden of posting.

My impression from those Prerak chose to invite to that board - hosted on the defunct Draft City site - is that there really wasn’t enough critical mass to keep the site must-check.

Of course, maybe that’s just how the Illuminati kept its secrecy.


(Disclosure: I was around and prominent enough it would have made sense for me to be invited, but was not invited. On a possibly related note, Prerak said some things that very much gave me the impression I annoyed him.

Also, just because it occurs to me to say:

The way I talk about Prerak and Tyler would give the impression they were older than I am, but this isn’t the case. I’m the old guy there, but they were mods here when I was a “ball boy”.)


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Prerak did not like a single human ever as far as I could tell. I also think nearly everyone was older that Prerak in the early days. He was a monster legend before he could shave.

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=6161

So he has .15 of total posts here and likely hasn’t posted for 15 years or thereabouts. At one point I think he had double digit #’s of total posts on the whole site. Before I knew he wasn’t just a person, I like many believed he was multiple people for that output. Even knowing for sure that it is true, it is impossible to comprehend how he did that while tearing through college at his age. Not only that consumed a mass amount of pop culture at the time.

[ForeverTFC]

Funny part is there were several users who joined RealGM strictly because of the Off-Topic board. I believe it got too out of hand drawing so many non-sports posters that RealGM decided to make the OT Board private so as the reduce lurkers who weren't posters. I could be wrong, though.

This was why I made my account. The funny pictures thread and the other picture thread. Made an account once it went private. Lurked for a long time still before actually posting.

Though I didn't join for the off-topic board, I joined for the Raps forum. I got here because Chuck Swirsky who used to call Raptors games wrote about it once in his weekly column on Raptors.com. He used to be a big fan, though we all know where that went.....

[Ryoga Hibiki]

it was really bad, then tsherkin finally left
now its okay

Was he that bad? i remember people talking about him but i was never a big GB poster

Sent from my moto g play (2021) using RealGM mobile app

So, let me say some stuff about Tyler Sherkin, because he deserves some Prerak-type love.

Tyler was extremely knowledgeable and could post incredibly quickly (like Prerak). Fast mind.

He was one of the key people in the Player Comparisons board culture as we developed it in the 00s. Any project, he’d be involved and he’d be a powerhouse.

I didn’t always see eye to eye with him, but lots of others can say that about me, so no shade there. Iron sharpens iron, as they say, and I certainly learned as a result of my interactions with him.

I don’t know what happened with him. I hope he’s okay. To my knowledge, he just disappeared. (Prerak by contrast made clear that he was going to stop posting.) if memory serves, he’d be nearing 40 now, so if anything bad happened to him, we’re not talking about normal human aging.

I wish him well.


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Prerak got scared to death by the Draftcity disaster, I guess

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[Ryoga Hibiki]

Am I remembering wrong or didn’t the draftexpress guys start off as posters/contributors here?

Started as Draftcity, and prerak was the guy owning the website. Then Givony pissed off some agent (I don't remember which one) who threatened to sue them all.
At that point, prerak fired Jonathan and closed everything, while Jonathan founded Draftexpress instead.
All this while I was covering the Eurocamp for the site, and midway through I changed my badge from Draftcity to Draftexpress.

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[Ryoga Hibiki]

prerak

And for those who don't know, there was once a poster named Prerak who dominated these boards. He posted TONS in seemingly every community to the point that there was a running gag where he wasn't a "he" but a team of people paid to take shifts.

Prerak's most significant thing though was probably founding Draft City with Jonathan Givony - which at one point was tied directly to the Draft message board (then called Draft City as well).

Then Draft City got threatened with a lawsuit based on something reported pertaining to a draft prospect. That site shut down, the RealGM draft board got renamed losing all association with the other site, and Prerak - to my knowledge - never did anything ambitious with basketball again (I believe he was about to go to med school when he made this decision).

Givony would then form Draft Express, which originally looked almost exactly like Draft City but with a different name, and continue to grow the site until going to work for ESPN. He made a specific splash in recent years being one of the most vocal proponents of LaMelo Ball at a time where Ball's prospect stock had really taken a tumble.

Well, Jonathan quoted in an article some scouts that anoninously were calling this agent (that I don't remember) an "****", "a liar" and all sorts of things.
It didn't make too much sense and there was really no point for me in my view, but the guy decided to threaten a lawsuit and prerak was scared to death.

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[GSWFan1994]

I’ll tell you the true story of RealGM. Most of those in charge now have made a conscious decision to bury the truth about the origins of the site.

(...)

Amazing post... a classic!

Better than 99,9% of the scripts Hollywood has been churning out for a least 2 decades now.

Kudos to you, sir.

[bwgood77]

I remember I found this place because I became terrified of the things being posted on the ESPN boards. That was a blackhole of thought.


I actually vaguely remember chatting with Howard Mass on AIM

I believe he still uses it.

[Doctor MJ]

Am I remembering wrong or didn’t the draftexpress guys start off as posters/contributors here?

Started as Draftcity, and prerak was the guy owning the website. Then Givony pissed off some agent (I don't remember which one) who threatened to sue them all.
At that point, prerak fired Jonathan and closed everything, while Jonathan founded Draftexpress instead.
All this while I was covering the Eurocamp for the site, and midway through I changed my badge from Draftcity to Draftexpress.

Sent from my Nokia 3210 using RealGM mobile app

Whoa! Had to have been bizarre to hear about while you were doing your thing across the Ocean.

[Doctor MJ]

Was he that bad? i remember people talking about him but i was never a big GB poster

Sent from my moto g play (2021) using RealGM mobile app

So, let me say some stuff about Tyler Sherkin, because he deserves some Prerak-type love.

Tyler was extremely knowledgeable and could post incredibly quickly (like Prerak). Fast mind.

He was one of the key people in the Player Comparisons board culture as we developed it in the 00s. Any project, he’d be involved and he’d be a powerhouse.

I didn’t always see eye to eye with him, but lots of others can say that about me, so no shade there. Iron sharpens iron, as they say, and I certainly learned as a result of my interactions with him.

I don’t know what happened with him. I hope he’s okay. To my knowledge, he just disappeared. (Prerak by contrast made clear that he was going to stop posting.) if memory serves, he’d be nearing 40 now, so if anything bad happened to him, we’re not talking about normal human aging.

I wish him well.

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He was just so, soooooooooooooooooooo insufferable though. You're right, we're probably all know-it-alls in our own way. For example, in my "civilian" life I almost never run into anybody who knows as much about the NBA as I do -- I'm not sure if this is something to brag about -- so it's hard not to develop even a tiny smidge of superiority over that. Then you come here and realize you might not even be in the 20th or 30th percentile, if that.

You're definitely not any worse than I've seen; far from it. And I will give you a ton of credit in that I frequently see you offering olive branches whenever you feel like you've overdone it. You are an adult.

In contrast to him, who just tripled and quadrupled down. I didn't interact with him much, but I remember the last straw being him insisting that he'd watched all of Magic Johnson's 1,096 career games in their entirety. Which is a patently ridiculous claim, for any number of reasons. I didn't even really care, but I remember calling him out on it and it just turned into some ridiculous back-and-forth for a full afternoon. And that was just a drop in the bucket of overall interactions I saw him have with people.

It's hard to respect somebody like that, even if probably the ultimate reason I didn't like him is that I recognized things in him that I don't like about myself. (You spot it, you got it and all of that.)

lol, there's truth in what you say about Tyler, and about all of us here.

Thank you for the kind words. Always nice to hear I've not been too much of a know-it-all to enjoy.