Basketball website needs a fun, cool web design!

Swoosh Nation

Swoosh Nation (SwooshNation.com) is a soon-to-be website which will cover everything basketball related: College basketball, the NBA, and even a little international coverage. But this is not just a news website, we are also a social network. The design should be something fresh, something unique. It should make any readers truly want to stay a while!

With my last contest (which was also my first contest) I gave feedback to every single design and rated all of them!

Here are some sites that I like the layout of, but our design should be completely unique:

http://hardwoodelite.com/
http://msn.foxsports.com/
http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/basketball
http://bleacherreport.com/
http://yardbarker.com/
http://www.nba.com/thunder/

Notes on attached files:

homepagepossibility.png - An example of what the homepage layout could look like. You do not need to follow this possibility, and in fact, in a way, I would sort-of prefer that you change some things up, use your creativity! If you have any ideas that you are not sure about if I would like, just send me a message!
articlelayoutpossiblity.png - Same as homepage possibility, but with the article page.
logo.png - Swoosh Nation's logo. It is scalable, so feel free to size it down a little to make it fit your layout!

Really, could be a basketball fan of any age, but probably mostly from the age of 16-25 and primarily males. These people probably have short attention spans and we really want to capture their attention with a great site design!

Home page needs to include: Logo, Search, Main Menu, Connect (Twitter/Facebook Fan Page/RSS), 1 or 2 ad spaces (300x250 and/or 728x90), Featured stories (slideshow), Headlines, Popular stories, Latest Articles, Rumors, Poll, button that says 'JOIN THE COMMUNITY!', copyright info at bottom of page, an extra menu somewhere on bottom left of the page, and a login.

We also need an article display page. Please do not start this until I approve the homepage design. This page needs to include: Logo, Search, Main Menu, 300x250 ad spot and possibly 728x90 ad, copyright info at bottom of page, share feature, login, an extra menu somewhere on bottom left of the page, and of course, the article (can be lorem ipsum)....

With the article, include: Written by FIRST LAST, Date (Day, date month year time), buttons for print, pdf, and email, rating (1-5 stars), a picture with a caption, and a hyperlinked word or phrase.

As for the menus...

Main menu items: Home, Community, Message Board, Transactions, The Draft, Rumor Mill, Fantasy, College, International, Podcast

Extra menu items: Home, Legal, Privacy Policy, Contact, Writers

You can optionally include items such as Twitter feed, facebook fan page, etc.

The rest is up to your creativity! Needs to be very cool and creative.

Formats needed: We need a PNG and layered PSD for both the home page and the article layout page.

Good luck!