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The following is a special post done for HTTN by Hamilton resident (and die-hard Leafs fan), James Scarfone (@jamesscarfone on twitter).

Sports fans love blogs that talk endlessly about their favourite teams because they provide a community and a different perspective. No longer do we need The Globe and Mail, TSN.ca or our usual local rag telling us what to think and only giving us so much information.

Bill Simmons, or @sportsguy33, of ESPN.com fame is the editor of a very cool new blog, Grantland.com. An offshoot of his wildly popular Sports Guy column, Grantland is something we haven’t seen before.

Grantland is a site devoted to thoughtful sportswriting with a splash of pop culture mixed in just for the hell of it. It’s refined without the pretentiousness.

The difference between Grantland and other blogs is mostly in the writing. It’s not a flashy site, for one. In fact, you could say it harks back to those fledgling late 90′s websites only without the awful font type and sad attempts at graphic design.

Personally, I could use a little more white screen and easy to read titles and a little less in-your-face links and video. Go to TSN or ESPN’s sites: way too much action. Granted, these are news sites and their mandate is to bury us in instant information. But there’s something to be said for simplicity. Grantland probably has one too many Subway ads, but who cares? Everyone loves Subway.

But enough about website design. This is about the good writing, which is what the goal should be for blogs that want to get ahead. You can get your news from anywhere after all.

Some of us still want good essays to feed our sports minds.

Instead of bringing in tired hacks, Simmons has recruited a who’s who list of top-notch writers—Malcolm Gladwell, Chuck Klosterman — who are huge sports fanatics as well. It’s all in the craft and they communicate sports in the way they were meant to be told: with passion, irreverance, depth and poetry.

There’s only one sportswriter in Canada, in my humble opinion, who can accomplish all this and that’s Stephen Brunt. Wish Simmons could get him too.

Canadians will be happy to know that Simmons has started liking hockey again after a nearly 20-year sabbatical. And if you want a take on the new Moneyball movie or a breakdown of Game of Thrones, Grantland’s got you covered.

Simmons is most certainly at his peak right now. He’s launching this site on the heels of his New York Times bestseller, “The Book of Basketball,” his B.S. Report podcast is one of the most popular podcasts on iTunes right now, and he just finished producing some of the best sports documentaries, part of the highly acclaimed 30 for 30 series on ESPN that aired in 2009-2010.

The great thing about Simmons is that he never comes off as one of those douchebag scribes I’ve come to hate so much. The guys who think they’re the cock of the walk because they’ve been writing about sports for over 30 years and brag about their accessibility to Jim Brown and Bill Russell. Apparently, they’re the Bible and sports is the most serious of matters.

They’ve missed the point. All we want is for them to take the writing seriously. Bill Simmons gets it.