Craft Beer & Drinks
Alcohol-Free Beer Has Gotten Good: What to Pour on Game Night
How non-alcoholic beer is made, which styles taste closest to the real thing, and how to host a long game where nobody feels left out.
9 minKeep reading
Courtside reading for game nights
Tip-off, wings and a cold one. We cover the whole night.
Basketball you can follow from a bar stool, game-day cooking that holds up for a crowd, beer worth the second round and the culture of watching sports together.
Welcome to Hoops & Grill
For fans who care about the fourth quarter and the food on the table in equal measure.
We are a small crew of writers who have cooked on pub lines, poured beer through playoff runs and charted more games than we can count. Here we write about the things that make a game night good: reading the action on a screen, wings that stay crisp, nachos that survive a long timeout, the right beer for a three-hour broadcast and the rooms where strangers end up high-fiving.
Recipes are cooked before they are written. Basketball pieces are watched, rewound and argued over. New articles land in the Playbook most weeks.
The game-day food guide
See the full guideFresh from the Playbook
All articles
Basketball
The Corner Three: How One Shot Rewired Basketball
The shortest three on the floor sits in a strip about three feet wide. How that geometry reshaped offences, rosters and the way defences think.
9 minKeep reading
Game Day
Building a Home Viewing Room: Screens, Sound and Seats
Screen size, sound, sightlines, a drink rail and a quiet fridge. A practical plan for a home room built around watching games with friends.
9 minKeep reading
Business
Working Game Nights: What Sports Bar Jobs Are Really Like
Servers, barbacks, cooks and door staff: what sports bar jobs involve, what a playoff shift feels like and how tips, training and hiring work.
9 minKeep reading
Bar Food & Recipes
Indoor Grilling When Winter Wins: Pans, Smokeless Grills and Broilers
No balcony grill and a room full of playoff guests. How grill pans, smokeless grills and broilers compare, and how to keep the smoke alarm quiet.
8 minKeep reading
Sports Culture
How Toronto Learned to Love Basketball
Basketball was invented by a Canadian, yet Toronto took a century to give it the main screen. Here is how a hockey city changed the channel.
9 minKeep reading
Pick a beat
The fan's calendarTip-off in October, March brackets, June finals and the long summer of trades: a year of games worth watching together.
Where to watchSightlines, sound, seats and the small clues that tell you a room will actually put your game on the big screen.
GalleryTaps, booths, walls of screens and the basement setups that rival them, in pictures and the notes that go with them.
