ESPN NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski will once again be a part of the network’s NBA Draft coverage this year (Thursday, 8 PM ET). He has become known by some for revealing the pick on Twitter ahead of when it is actually announced. However, that is going to change this year.
Wojnarowski was a guest on The Ryen Russillo Podcast and he said that this year, he wants to focus more on storytelling and diving into other things rather than trying to be the first to tweet the pick out.
“Going forward from Yahoo to ESPN and seeing what the responsibility is on the broadcast and feeling like I need to be fully engaged in the show. I’m not doing the picks this year. That doesn’t mean at the top of the draft, something weird is happening at 2 or 3, yes…But, the pick-by-pick, I don’t think it has value anymore for me or ESPN.”
Wojnarowski mentioned that he talked to Malika Andrews, who will be hosting the draft for the second straight year, and she agreed with the decision.
“I started this a long time ago and I had all this information on Yahoo that I was getting in real time, By the time we put it up on the site, it’s vapor. I said Twitter, this is a place for it. I think now, it’s important for me to stay on the top of the trades and the movement and be able to do a little more storytelling of what’s going on on the board in rea-ltime in the draft instead of my head buried trying to get New Orleans’s pick at 14 that’s obviously going to be out momentarily on the show.”
Throughout the busy times on the NBA calendar, Wojnarowski is getting a lot of different information from different people around the NBA. He told Russillo that he is always making judgments on information daily.
“You learn over time track records of people with you and sometimes you learn lessons the hard way very early on. Decisions I would have made in my first, second, third year at Yahoo are different then ones I make now at ESPN having covered the league on a full-time basis for a decade and a half.”
Wojnarowski made it clear that it is important to have relationships at all levels of the league because it allows you to look at the situation differently. While nobody can get every report right, he knows he is being judged on the information he puts out.
“You better have relationships at all the levels. Ownership, presidents, GM, coaching, player, league office, union, agents. All of them together create a prism to see situations through and looking through any one of those prisms can often be trouble. A lot of these people that you are talking to, you are talking to very often all year long. You rely on your ability to trust people, trust the information, and do the best you can.”
