Late at night on Feb. 1, newly minted ESPN NBA insider Shams Charania broke the news that would shake the foundation of the NBA. Luka Doncic was headed to the Lakers for pennies.
That night, the news cycle was as much about the speculation that Charania’s X account had been hacked as it was about LeBron James, Nico Harrison, or even Doncic himself. At that moment, it felt as if Charania would continue to deliver the same magical online moments that his predecessor, Adrian Wojnarowski, gave us as basketball fans.
But ahead of an offseason that Charania and fellow ESPNer Brian Windhorst have promised will be a movie, the timeline is pretty quiet. June is usually the peak of Slop Season, that delirious period of the calendar when NBA fans bathe themselves in rumors and make a nest in the grapevine. Several superstars are trending on the trade machine, yet the Woj Bombs that once powered the machine have stopped dropping.
This NBA offseason, our first without Wojnarowski in nearly two decades, has been… boring.
Even Giannis Antetokounmpo, one of the superstars that rival fanbases dream of poaching this summer, feels Woj’s absence.
Does anyone else miss Woj?!
— Giannis Antetokounmpo (@Giannis_An34) June 11, 2025
Indeed, there is a chance Giannis was sub-tweeting Charania, who recently reported the two-time NBA MVP could explore a move from Milwaukee. I choose to believe he is instead doing media analysis and yearns for the days of Woj.
When they worked together, Windhorst often referred to Wojnarowski as the 31st NBA franchise. The former New Jersey sports columnist understood the power of Twitter before anyone, worked his way to the Worldwide Leader, and fed the maw of the NBA internet for years. Along the way, he turned sports reporting into a footrace, giving birth to a generation of imitators who will navigate relationships and high-stakes coverage far less delicately than he did. In many ways, Wojnarowski left the industry in a worse state than he found it.
I know this is true, but when I open X these days, the hunger pangs quickly set in. I miss that carefully orchestrated, willfully partisan, sweet, sweet intel.
When Wojnarowski began his transition from columnist to insider at Yahoo in the early 2010s, he sensed the growing desire for content to fill a news cycle that was expanding toward 24/7. The technology was there for him to fill it. The modern sports news breaker was born. They quickly became a fixture in how sports fans engage with their favorite players and teams.
On Christmas Day 2022, Wojnarowski kicked off a day of wall-to-wall NBA coverage on ESPN with a tweet. Suddenly, according to Wojnarowski, nomadic Philadelphia 76ers guard James Harden was interested in a free agency reunion with his former team, the Houston Rockets. The most obsessive fans had already seen this idea bandied in local reports and on gossipy podcasts, but Wojnarowski made it gospel. His tweet marked the unofficial start of the Harden sweepstakes and gave ESPN segment producers a gold mine to dig into on the biggest TV day of the regular season.
News days like this in the Wojnarowski era were transparently ridiculous. Of course, Harden’s return to Houston did not come together overnight on Christmas Eve. You had to suspend disbelief to watch Woj, the King of NBA Twitter and instantaneous transaction news, kick off the story on television.
Sitting through the dry spell so far this NBA offseason, it’s hard not to wonder whether that was simply the cost of NBA information for fans. The days of on-the-record sports reporting were killed off by bigger paychecks and higher stakes a long time ago. Agents are characters in sports stories more than ever before, and public negotiations, facilitated through insiders like Wojnarowski, are part of the fabric of sports. Perhaps Wojnarowski helped accelerate those lamentable changes, but NBA coverage did not snap back to a utopia when he retired last year.
Instead, there is a Wojnarowski-sized hole in NBA content these days. Others have stepped in for Wojnarowski’s SportsCenter and Get Up hits. Intel still trickles in from local newspapers or independent newsbreakers. It’s just not the same.
With Wojnarowski, we got info. It was what the power brokers in the league wanted, and it was carefully scripted. If you were the fan of a team with a star player up for grabs, maybe you felt actively manipulated — like Woj was working against you. However, the NBA thrives on drama, both on the court and online, and Wojnarowski delivered it.
Without him, there is just less.
This is not a shot at Charania (or independent reporters like Marc Stein, Chris Haynes, and Jake Fischer). They give everything they have. But Woj was the only one who ever seemed to have the whole picture, verified and reportable.
Some of this can be attributed to cutbacks in basketball media. Since TNT Sports lost its NBA rights last year, the network and its subsidiary, Bleacher Report, have pulled back. The Athletic did not back-fill Charania’s job with a new insider. Outlets like Yahoo and The Ringer produce YouTube shows that provide analysis and reactions rather than focusing on breaking news.
The authority of ESPN put Woj on a pedestal. But without him, we’re learning that pedestal is harder to stand on than we thought. It wasn’t just the four letters. It wasn’t just Twitter. It wasn’t just the back-room intel dealing.
Woj was the GOAT, and I miss him.