It was a classic Wojnarowski story: a news “scoop” of dubious value followed by a news scoop of real value, and a rare compliment given to the man involved in both. (Wojnarowski declined to comment on this episode, or anything else in the piece. A Yahoo spokesperson provided this statement: “The depth and quality of Adrian's coverage of the NBA for Yahoo Sports over the past eight years has been unparalleled. We are fortunate to have him on our team.”) But to truly understand how Wojnarowski and his sources operate, there is no better place to look than his relationship with Joe Dumars, who worked as the Detroit Pistons president of basketball operations from 2000 to 2014.
Dumars was very successful for the first half of his executive career, assembling teams that won an NBA Championship and reached six consecutive Eastern Conference Finals. During his final six years in Detroit however—before he “stepped down” instead of being fired—the Pistons were one of the worst teams in the league, largely because of a series of disastrous decisions Dumars made. You would never know about it, though, if you read only Wojnarowski for your Pistons coverage.
With Detroit sliding down the standings, Wojnarowski broke nearly every significant—and insignificant—Pistons story for a half-decade: the Allen Iverson
trade, the Amir Johnson
trade,
drafting Austin Daye,
signing Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva,
hiring John Kuester,
trading Aaron Afflalo,
signing Chris Wilcox,
signing Ben Wallace,
drafting Greg Monroe,
signing Tracy McGrady, Rip Hamilton
arguing with John Kuester,
drafting Brandon Knight,
hiring Lawrence Frank,
re-signing Tayshuan Prince,
re-signing Rodney Stuckey,
trading Ben Gordon,
signing Josh Smith,
signing Chauncey Billups,
signing Brandon Jennings,
signing Josh Harrellson, and
firing Mo Cheeks. While Wojnarowski was busy breaking news about the team, he wasn’t busy analyzing it: Between 2008 and 2012, Wojnarowski didn’t write a negative piece about Dumars or the Pistons, despite the fact that they had transformed from a perennial contender to an also-ran. Instead, Wojnarowski penned several sympathetic profiles of Dumars, including ones that covered his completion of his college degree and another wholly about his defensive skills as a player in the 1980s.
By 2012, Wojnarowski could no longer ignore how poorly Dumars was performing, so he wrote
a piece on the Pistons’ rebuilding. It included heavy participation from Dumars and unearned optimism like “Slowly, surely, Dumars is regenerating the Pistons again.” In each of the two seasons after the piece ran, the Pistons went 29–53 and missed qualifying for the playoffs by nine games. It also emphasized Dumars’ strong relationship with coach Lawrence Frank, “who has returned accountability to the locker room.” Dumars would fire Frank six months later.
In 2010, the NBA fined Dumars $500,000 for leaking multiple confidential league memos to Wojnarowski, according to multiple sources. This matches the third largest publicly known fine the league has ever handed down. The NBA decided that too many memos were making it into the media, so they conducted a sting operation over several months. They would change a few words or numbers in different team’s copies of otherwise identical memos, so that when the memos leaked they could spot the small differences and trace them back to the leaker. This approach caught Dumars red-handed, as well as an executive from another team who was fined $12,500 for leaking to a draft-focused website. Joe Dumars, the Detroit Pistons, and the NBA all declined to comment on the fine.
