The final Woj bomb is going to leave a major blast radius.
With just weeks before the NBA season, Adrian Wojnarowski’s retirement stunned everyone, even his bosses. (Of course he couldn’t let his own departure get scooped.)
The timing is fascinating, as the league is on the final year of its current media-rights deals, and rights holders and non-rights holders alike scramble to line up talent.
While Amazon and NBC assemble coverage teams behind the scenes with their rights still a year out, the butterfly effect from Woj’s retirement will ripple around basketball media for weeks and months to come.
No one will benefit more than Shams Charania, Wojnarowski’s mentee turned foil.
Charania’s deals with The Athletic, Stadium, and FanDuel are all reportedly expiring, making him the ultimate free agent at the perfect time. Charania was making between $3 million and $4 million a year from those companies, according to a source familiar with his deals—higher than has been previously reported. Wojnarowski had three years left on a deal that paid him $7 million annually.
ESPN is likely to talk to Charania, Front Office Sports reported Wednesday. The dominoes could then fall quickly across several outlets, maybe even creating a hiring spree that hasn’t been seen in sports media in years.
The Athletic
If Charania left The Athletic, it would be the equivalent of Aaron Judge leaving the Yankees. He’s been the face of its NBA coverage since the company hired him in 2018 and one of the most recognizable names associated with the former start-up, which has since been bought by The New York Times. A former Athletic executive once told The Washington Post it wouldn’t be worth having an NBA vertical without Charania.
The company probably wouldn’t nuke its NBA coverage if Charania left—probably. (Disclosure: I covered the Brooklyn Nets beat there from 2019 to 2023). But it started by focusing on local sports, and over time has shifted to a sport-by-sport model that more closely resembles ESPN. Like ESPN, The Athletic has one dedicated brand-name news-breaker in each major sport; it would make sense for the company to chase another should Charania leave.
Chris Haynes is also a free agent, and would be a logical successor for either Woj or Shams. Though Haynes has largely worked on camera recently with TNT Sports, he has extensive writing experience at Yahoo and Bleacher Report.
Could he work out a similar arrangement to Charania in which he writes for The Athletic as an insider, but goes on camera elsewhere? Or would he rather wait for Amazon or NBC to come calling?
Yahoo Sports
Woj and Shams’s original stomping ground has been investing in sports again recently. Kevin O’Connor, formerly of The Ringer, recently announced he was moving to Yahoo Sports. NBA reporter Jake Fischer announced just Wednesday that he was leaving the company; could Fischer and O’Connor be ships in the night? Fischer is more of an insider while O’Connor is more of a podcaster and analyst, but both have the large social media followings coveted by executives.
Yahoo has returned to its strategy of building small, elite sports coverage teams. It has a strong tag team of Dan Wetzel and Ross Dellenger covering college sports, and it recently announced a combat sports vertical under veteran journalist Ariel Helwani.
That was how they handled sports coverage in the early 2010s; when he was at Yahoo, Wojnarowski ran “The Vertical,” which at one point included Charania, current ESPN front office insider Bobby Marks, and current Sports Illustrated reporter Chris Mannix.
Wojnarowski’s retirement opens up a void in NBA news breaking that Charania can absorb more of, but still creates a window for others. Similar to The Athletic, does Yahoo want to lean in to the newly created gap and seek a reunion with someone like Haynes, or stick to the small, versatile coverage approach?
The Ringer
Aside from having to replace O’Connor, The Ringer is perhaps the company least affected by Tuesday’s news. Bill Simmons’s outlet has broken stories, but it has never made a daily pipeline of breaking news its calling card, instead focusing on podcasts and creative NBA analysis.
Given Spotify’s heavy interest in podcasts, it’s hard to see the company pivoting in light of the possible NBA news vacuum, but the only constant in media is change. Never say never.
