Adrian "Woj" Wojnarowski Announces His Retirement

          Senior Insider for ESPN’s “Inside the NBA” (National Basketball Association), Adrian “Woj” Wojnarowski, has retired from Insider News to pursue general management with his alma mater’s basketball team, St. Bonaventure. Wojnarowski previously worked for Yahoo! Sports and ESPN. Woj said that his commitment as Senior NBA Insider is something that he is “no longer driven” to pursue. This is a huge blow to the NBA team on ESPN. The number of contacts and connections to informants in the league that Woj had amassed over his years in sports journalism was truly unparalleled, meaning Woj was an indispensable asset for Inside the NBA. On ESPN, Woj said, “After all these years of reporting on everyone’s teams, I’m headed back to my own.”

          One thing that distinguished Woj from other analysts in his field was his aforementioned connections. He is almost always the first person to post about significant trades or acquisitions in basketball. The term “Woj bomb” was coined whenever Wojnarowski broke the news of a major trade or free agency acquisition, and there have been quite a few “Woj Bombs” throughout the past seven years. One memorable “Woj bomb” was on July 11, 2019, at 8:26 PM, when Woj made a Twitter post to announce news that would send NBA fans and teams alike into a frenzy: a trade between the Houston Rockets and the Oklahoma City Thunder that sent superstar guard Russell Westbrook to Houston for veteran guard Chris Paul, a move that no one was expecting to happen. This trade meant that Westbrook would team up with James Harden, his former Thunder teammate, on the Rockets. Although this move never led to a championship for either party involved, the initial announcement of the trade was still a bombshell. Woj also covered the situation between Harden and the Houston Rockets in 2020 that eventually led to the star guard being traded to the Brooklyn Nets. Woj covered hundreds and hundreds of other stories and was essential to ESPN’s team of insiders for the NBA. Everyone is sad to see him leave the ESPN team, but also happy because he gets to do what makes him happy: leading a team that he is passionate about.