Nine times out of 10, if a significant trade or breaking news story comes out, it’s usually coming out of Yahoo! Sports lead NBA news breaker, Adrian Wojnarowski. For so long, Wojnarowski has been at the top when it comes to breaking NBA news. He knows the trade before it happens, he knows the contract agreement before it was even finalized and he might even know what some individual NBA players had for breakfast.
But for the last decade, Woj has been on Yahoo’s NBA coverage team, and he even got a chance to lead a group of writers over at ‘The Vertical.’ But now it appears that Woj might be leaning towards stepping away from Yahoo amid a new acquisition from Verizon and even some issues over e-mail hacking. Those might not be the main sources of an impending departure but those factors could play a part.
Following from Kevin Draper of Deadspin.
NBA scoopmaster Adrian Wojnarowski is close to an agreement to leave Yahoo and join ESPN, according to multiple sources, a huge shakeup in the basketball reporting world that will have a wider-reaching effects beyond where you get your news. And according to one source, Wojnarowski isn’t the only Yahoo basketball journalist that will move to ESPN.
At the time Wojnarowski and Yahoo signed a four-year contract worth over $6 million. According to a source, Wojnarowski’s exit from Yahoo is complicated, and will likely take months to fully sort out. It isn’t clear if the contract has an escape clause, or if ESPN or Wojnarowski is paying Yahoo a buyout, or something else.
Between writers, editors, podcasts, video, and freelancers, The Vertical has a dozen or so journalists. According to a source, some of them—it isn’t clear who—are expected to join Wojnarowski at ESPN.
Wojnarowski and his agent didn’t respond to phone calls requesting comment. ESPN declined to comment. Yahoo PR had not finished “looking into it” by press time.
As Draper notes in his article, and even in a piece he did over two years ago, Adrian Wojnarowski has had a long disdain for ESPN dating back to his days writing for The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey. But with the NBA media landscape always changing, this could be a move to join the ESPN empire and dominate his coverage even more.
