Roles & Expertise
- Basketball historian & archivist — Documenting global basketball players with detailed career histories, league context, and long‑form analysis.
- Scouting analyst — Producing evaluative scouting reports and talent assessments across multiple leagues and eras.
- Content systems architect — Designing HeatingUp’s taxonomy, data structures, and large‑scale content frameworks for long‑term scalability.
- Technical publisher — Maintaining structured, high‑volume reference platforms built on accuracy, consistency, and clean information design.
I’m a Melbourne, Australia–based basketball researcher and database architect focused on building and maintaining detailed player and team records across both categorical and numerical metrics. I spend more than 35 hours per week researching, updating, and verifying statistics with an emphasis on accuracy, consistency, and completeness. HeatingUp is a long‑term project I created to develop a comprehensive basketball reference platform covering historical and current data in a clean, structured format. The aim is to provide reliable, easy‑to‑access information that goes beyond surface‑level statistics. As a supporter of Melbourne United in the NBL and the Houston Rockets in the NBA, I follow the game closely from both a local and global perspective, which informs my ongoing research and data coverage.
I’m the publisher, editor, and founder of HeatingUp. I’ve been around basketball for most of my life. I grew up in Greater Melbourne in a family with a strong connection to some of Victoria’s most competitive basketball leagues, and I played both domestic basketball in the Kilsyth & Mountain District Basketball Association and representative basketball in the Victorian Junior Basketball League during the 1990s. Between the ages of 8 and 13, I played more than 10 seasons of Division 1 basketball across the Kilsyth Cobras and Kilsyth Heat, won two championships with the Heat, and made numerous finals appearances across club and school teams. I’ve played with and against athletes who later became professionals, including NBL and American college players. I’m also an avid NBL fan and a proud supporter of Melbourne United, which gives me an even deeper personal connection to the game beyond the site itself.
I built HeatingUp around a style of basketball coverage I believe is genuinely useful: structured roster pages, player data, statistical breakdowns, and clearly framed basketball context that help readers understand a team or player quickly without having to sort through messy tables or generic summaries. My focus is on practical basketball analytics in a readable format, combining public records, statistical reference work, and editorial interpretation to make the information sharper, cleaner, and more valuable on the page. Some pages are mainly factual, while others include my own judgment on a player’s archetype, offensive role, defensive role, play style, or overall on-court identity. When I make those calls, I aim to keep them grounded in evidence, role, context, and how the player actually functioned rather than relying on surface-level stats or recycled wording.
A lot of the information on HeatingUp has been gathered through years of detective work, conversations with friends, family, and professional athletes, reading books, consulting with readers who email me, and using my experience online to source reliable information. I have also developed original ways of presenting numerical and categorical basketball data on the site, including the proprietary HeatingUp Impact Index, a simplified per-game composite metric designed to capture a player’s all-around impact by combining scoring, rebounding, playmaking, and defensive activity into a single easy-to-compare value. That work also includes concepts such as Role Tiers, Usage Tiers, and STK, which combines steals and blocks per game. Across the site, my goal is to make basketball information clearer, more honest, and more useful, while being transparent about what is fact and what is interpretation.
Outside of HeatingUp, I have more than 15 years of experience working online as a journalist, technical writer, reviewer, and analyst. I’ve worked full-time online as a writer and editor since 2011, previously covering technology and running ConsumingTech.com as well. Because I manage multiple projects, some updates on HeatingUp can occasionally take time, but I read every email and continue updating the site as consistently as possible. Whether I’m building a straightforward player page or a more analytical piece, the aim is the same: to present basketball information in a way that is clear, accurate, readable, and worth the reader’s time.
For more on how HeatingUp handles quality, updates, and editorial decisions, you can also read the site’s Editorial Standards, Corrections Policy, and Data Methodology pages.
Mat Diekhake
Founder: HeatingUp.net
Read all of my posts: Posts by Mat Diekhake.