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Years down the road, when blogologists examine how and why blogs emerged as a reliable source of information for sports fans, Mike Kurylo's Knickerblogger will be a primary source. Kurylo was the first team blogger in the basketball world to incorprate advanced stats into his coverage.  Knickerblogger's stat page is heavily bookmarked among basketball stat junkies. Kurylo has also been a regular competitor in the TrueHoop Stat Geek Smackdown.

Knickerblogger was one of the first proponents of offensive and defensive efficiency statistics and, for years, has been a hub for all kinds of great number-crunching. When and how did you first get turned on to more advanced statistical data?  
It seemed that just about everyone who grew up in New York city in the late 70s/early 80s loved baseball. I played in backyards, little leagues, schoolyards, and in the street. In the summers of my youth, my grammar school would be open for kids to play games. Twice a day one of the adults would organize a huge wiffle ball game, and 20 to 30 kids would line up to play.
 
At a young age I received a baseball encyclopedia as a birthday present, and I loved that book. As a Yankee fan it allowed me to relive their rich history. Chesbro. Gehrig. Ruth. DiMaggio. Mantle. It was a living record of what happened before my time, and through it I was able to understand the past.
 
Around this time, baseball simulation games became popular and the computer age was emerging. In the mid/late 80s I began to play games like Pursue the Penant (now Diamond Mind), Strat-o-Matic, and Micro-League baseball. Playing them revealed that many mainstream stats like RBIs, Batting Average, and Wins were a poor way to evaluate players. When playing these games, I had to throw out the conventional knowledge and develop my own ideas on how to evaluate players.
 
More than a decade later my focus shifted to basketball. Writers like Rob Neyer helped me discover an underworld revolution of statisticians who grew up questioning conventional wisdom. I found the APBRmetrics group, Dean Oliver's "Basketball on Paper" and John Hollinger's writings, which helped cultivate my basketball statistical knowledge.
 
What are you doing with a sports blog?
I started KnickerBlogger shortly after learning about advanced NBA statistics, with one goal in mind. My focus was to provide NBA coverage from an objective perspective. At the time there was little basketball coverage from an advanced statistical outlook, and I wanted to provide a place for people who felt that the mainstream media lacked an objective presence. To this day my goal remains the same. I want to bring statistical analysis to a broad audience in an easy to understand yet enjoyable manner.
 
What, to you, is the point of a sports blog?
The point is to fill a niche in the sports world. For a blog to be successful, they need to offer the reader something that they can't get elsewhere. There are many different types of blogs, and today some blogs may offer multiple areas of interest. For instance KnickerBlogger was founded on objective analysis, but today it also offers a stat page and a community of intelligent readers who enhance the site with their commentary.
 
What are some big questions about the game you have that statistics haven't answered to your satisfaction?
The first is how to assign individual defense. We know pretty well how to evaluate defense on a team level. But figuring out exactly how to credit each defender is much more difficult.
 
The second is the value of shot creation. How much (if any) value does a player give by being able to create his own shot? Advocates against shot creation point to Allen Iverson's history of being on bad offenses. Advocates for shot creation laugh at the thought of a 5 man rotation without a shotmaker.
 
The third is more a problem with how stats are kept. The NBA should do a better job of what they track. Simple things like possessions, charges, and blocked shots out of bounds, could be done immediately. And there are people out there who are doing defensive charting. These things could be invaluable for analysts. If I were in a competitive and lucrative business like the NBA, I would want to have every possible advantage.  
 
The Knicks, being New York's team, get more column inches than any basketball team on earth.  How do you carve out a place for yourself as an independent blogger?
I'm not sure if I agree with that statement. The Lakers are in a major market as well, and have a richer history. However the Knicks probably do have the league's highest ratio of "words written about them"/wins.
 
Anyway, I think being unique in the early days made it easier. There weren't many Knick blogs and there weren't many statistically savvy NBA sites. Being both helped create a robust community of readers and commenters. I think today that community continues to make KnickerBlogger valuable and relevant.

Your earliest posts opened with song lyrics that echoed the game you were recapping or the argument you were trying to convey. What's the appropriate verse for the Knicks rebuilding effort under Donnie Walsh and Mike D'Antoni?  
I stopped doing that because I would obsess over the song lyric. It would take me an hour to write an article, then two hours to find the right lyrics to fit it.
 
For D'Antoni I might use this:
"You do expect a Messiah
You want to be European
I would be your Bonaparte
Don't ever care 'bout what Napoleon says"
--Phoenix, "Napoleon Says"
 
For Walsh , probably :
"So I'll march my feet to a different drum
Down the avenue
Tell you what I'm going to do
I'm going take everything, everything
Take it to the start, and give it a new lining, so it's so inviting."
--The Heartless Bastards, "Gray"