What is a Woj Bomb? Nowadays it is so easy to follow the NBA. We got the app on our phone, we follow a bunch of media personalities, websites, blogs, and all kinds of NBA junkies on social media, and most of the time we are well informed on everything that is going on in the NBA.

But let actually ask you something. When LeBron James signed with the Los Angeles Lakers or when Kawhi Leonard was traded to the Toronto Raptors or when Kyrie Irving was traded to the Boston Celtics or when Nikola Jokic won his second consecutive MVP Award, and whenever there were some of the biggest NBA storylines to the last five or six years, how did you first find out about it?

I would be willing to bet that most of you found out through Adrian Wojnarowski, the ultimate NBA insider who calls his top breaking news Woj Bombs. There is no reporter or insider that comes close to the level of involvement in the fandom of any particular sport and any of the other major sports leagues than watch does and it’s gotten to the point that if you don’t have his Twitter notifications on then many people won’t consider you to be a true NBA fan.

But how did we get to this point where a column reporter turned insider is now just as big a part of the league as the players or coaches or general managers?

Adrian Wojnarowski was just another student enrolling to attend St. Bonaventure University and afterward landed a job at the Fresno Bee when he was 25 years old. He started as an intern where he was writing columns for two years.

From there, he went to writing for a couple of media from 1997 to 2006 where his columns on New York City sports teams did start to gain him some attention and even a few awards. But it was his move to Yahoo Sports in 2006 that was really the beginning of the creation of the famous NBA insider that we all know today.

Things were pretty much different in sports reporting back in the day and we need to understand something about the environment around sports journalism at the time. The industry was in a transitional phase and was struggling to keep up with cable news outlets such as ESPN where instead of reading the newspaper every morning to catch up on the previous night’s games and read columns, fans could simply turn on SportsCenter or go to espn.com to get all the information they wanted instantly. So the print news audience was shrinking drastically and so what ended up happening and what watch caught on to, was that the real way to get attention in this new space wasn’t to just write about the scores from the previous night or general story but to be the one breaking the news and reporting on rumors around the league instead.

As Brian Curtis described in a Grantland article in 2014, the chief method of putting points on the board in the trade rumor era is to file a story that includes the words league source, inserting the phrases “I’m told” or “I’m hearing” adds a further layer of mystery. He realized that his regular opinion columns just might not get as much traction or cultivate as much interest anymore.

But if Wojnarowski was getting the inside scoop on the growing fan interest in the offseason and free agency and trade rumors, and the draft, if he could break those stories first, if he reported it before anyone else did, it would put him on another level.

However, especially in the beginning, this method didn’t always work out great for him. Wojnarowski had a habit of throwing in his opinion a lot more than he does now and also wasn’t nearly as accurate. He wrote a ton of pieces about LeBron’s first free agency in 2010 and looking back on it now never really had much of a scoop there. He had other run-ins that didn’t do much for his reputation either but there were bright spots in the early days as well such as on draft night in 2011 when he called nearly half of the first-round selections and tweeted them out before their names were even called and well before ESPN could cover them.

ESPN had aired the event since 2003, and the 2011 version started like all the others, with then-NBA Commissioner David Stern announcing the first pick in his nasally New York accent: “The Cleveland Cavaliers select Kyrie Irving, from Duke University.”

But then a strange thing happened. At 7:43 p.m., Yahoo Sports NBA columnist Adrian Wojnarowski tweeted: “The Timberwolves have already alerted Derrick Williams’ camp: They’re drafting him with the No. 2 pick.” Two minutes later Stern walked out to the stage and repeated the same thing. At 7:56 p.m., Wojnarowski tweeted “The Cavs will draft Tristan Thompson with the fourth pick, a source says.” A minute later Stern made it official. Wojnarowski scooped half of the 30 first-round picks, and his Yahoo Sports colleague Marc Spears racked up a few more.

At that time, Wojnarowski had 90,000 followers on Twitter. Today he has over 800,000. His owning of the 2011 draft “was the first time you saw the power of Twitter [in sports journalism],” says Sports Business Journal reporter John Ourand. Wojnarowski now breaks news on Twitter so frequently that his fans have quit lumping his messages in with the millions of other “tweets” sent every day. Instead, basketball fans refer to them as #WojBombs. They are so essential to the functioning of the NBA that those same league executives have turned on text notifications just for Wojnarowski’s tweets.

Over the years, Wojnarowski built his library of sources up to where he is now much more plugged in than he was then and therefore much less prone and nearly completely immune to the kind of mistakes he’s made in the past.  He stayed with Yahoo Sports in the same role right up until the 2017 NBA free agency when he made the jump to ESPN and immediately started covering the league for them.

This seemed like an almost inevitable thing at some point as Woj had flirted with the idea and despite everything he built over at Yahoo, ESPN is still the king but it was actually pretty ironic that he ended up there given his past history. He actually wrote over a hundred columns for ESPN back when he was working for the record but was also pretty adversarial towards the company and his reporters in his time at Yahoo he referred to longtime ESPN writer and then Grizzlies executive John Hollinger as quote a statistician that worked for a cable company.

In a piece criticizing their trade of Rudy Gay to the Raptors in 2013, he was known to throw jabs at ESPN about the fact that as Woj put it in response to an ESPN writer “you guys have 75 guys there you really should break every story”.

Woj was a guy who was up at all hours of the night and working the phones and sources to get the next big scoop. Even in his own words in an interview about his move to ESPN in 2017, he said: “I’m really competitive and this is a competitive marketplace and when I’m against you I’m going against you when I’m with you I’m with you.”

Sports reporting is not seen by many from its competitive aspect. How competitive Woj was and still is, made him a reputation as the guy for MBA scoops and if he gets one completely wrong or someone gets to a big story before him it would be crushing to him.

Woj kind of has to be that level of competition because it’s a ton of pressure to work under. One of the better examples of his unwillingness to let anyone else break big news before him came in the 2018 NBA draft. This was the first year he covered the NBA draft for ESPN and the network had a policy against reporting or tweeting the selections before they were broadcast so it was not to interfere with the live TV coverage.

But Woj wasn’t gonna let anyone else break those picks so he got a bit creative breaking out with the source and using every synonym in the book to tweet out which player each team was planning on selecting in not so absolute terms so it was not to go against ESPN’s policy.

That brings us to the present day where Wojnarowski is settling into his fifth full year at ESPN. He certainly becomes more of a personality at a worldwide leader is even during his peak years.

At Yahoo, he rarely appeared on screen and chose to do mostly voiceover appearances. If he wasn’t writing a story or tweeting out news a Twitter account that for the longest time didn’t even have his face on the profile picture.

He was much more of a mystery man back then just known as the best NBA insider in the game and now we’re starting to see him and know him a bit more as he gets more and more comfortable with ESPN. Wojnarowski wanted to be a bigger part of the TV space and appear on-screen more and has been a fixture on a number of shows on the network and continues to break big story after big story.

In addition to running his own podcast his work at ESPN has quickly impressed his colleagues.  It is honestly pretty incredible that a news reporter has worked his way up to be this big a part of the league to the point where he is considered by some as you have heard the thirty-first franchise of the NBA.

Living under that kind of pressure we have seen him describing his job as a 52-week-long conversation and something that he does 365 days a year without a day off. But Woj absolutely loves his position and certainly, he has to with all the hours and travel and late nights and everything that goes into it to be that kind of competitive, to be the absolute best at what he does and what he describes as an incredibly competitive industry.

But things didn’t go so smoothly for Woj with ESPN as he was once suspended by the network. In 2020, Woj was suspended by ESPN, a day after a profane email from him to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., was leaked to the social media.

The incident occurred after Hawley’s office sent a news release detailing a letter he planned to send NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, criticizing the league’s decision to limit messages players can wear on their uniforms to “pre-approved, social justice slogans” while “censoring support” for law enforcement and criticism of the Chinese Communist Party.

Hawley wrote a letter to Adam Silver that the league’s “free expression appears to stop at the edge of your corporate sponsors’ sensibilities.”

“F— you,” Wojnarowski responded, according to Hawley.

“Don’t criticize #China or express support for law enforcement to @espn. It makes them really mad,” Hawley tweeted with an apparent screenshot of the response.

The ESPN reporter did not censor his message, spelling out the four-letter word. Wojnarowski did not immediately respond when asked for comment but apologized shortly after via Twitter.

“I was disrespectful and I made a regrettable mistake. I am sorry for the way I handled myself and I am reaching out immediately to Senator Hawley to apologize directly,” he wrote. I also need to apologize to my ESPN colleagues because I know my actions were unacceptable and should not reflect on any of them,” wrote Wojnarowski after the incident.

Wojnarowski has needed more than just a strong work ethic, though, to develop the best sources in basketball. If you look closely at his columns and talk to people in the NBA, you discover that he mixes his reporting and opinion writing in improper ways, rewarding sources with flattery and punishing the uncooperative with nastiness. In fact, it often appears as though Adrian Wojnarowski lets his sourcing dictate not just the topic but also the tone of his writing. In private, NBA reporters complain endlessly about Wojnarowski’s methods. Some of it is undoubtedly professional jealousy, but his body of work shows they also have a point.