How the NBA Media Game Works
Hot takes, weird narratives and access journalism all happen for a reason
This is The Konnor Mac Show, a newsletter about Sports Opinions Unfiltered, the Konnor Mac Way. After reading Ethan Strauss over at House of Strauss give reasons as to why he left traditional sports media, I decided to expand even further about the degradation of content in the last half-decade. It is important to distinguish entertainers from reporters, but if you’ve been following any part of sports media during this time, both are blending together with disastrous consequences. Everything you see and read from all the big reporters has someone behind the scenes with a message that wants to get out there. The brutal, specific calculations lead everything to feel like authenticity in reporting is on the way out.
Stephen A. Smith is the most obvious example, but it’s unfair to blame everything entirely on him. He was a beat writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer for nearly 20 years in the traditional reporter role, then transitioned into a TV personality. Those of age remember when he was in Kobe Bryant’s corner, frequently having him on his programs and defending him against the rising tide of LeBron James praise. This happened at a time when Kobe was far and away the most hated player in the league, by opposing fans and the media. Stephen A. admits that he owes a great debt to Allen Iverson for launching his career, and it was well known in media circles that Smith was Iverson’s “guy” and no one in the league had the same access to him as Stephen A. What you’re noticing now is to be a big name reporter, you need to latch on to a player and become their “guy” to get stories. If it’s not a player, a high level executive or two or an agent with 25 of the league’s best players will suffice.
I’ll never forget what Marcus Thompson, the Warriors reporter for the Athletic and my former college professor told me: major news outlets don’t hire reporters just to report, but rather they hire various reporters to cover “angles.” In other words, for most star players, there’s a pro-player reporter/talking head, and for some they have a pro and anti-player reporter or talking head. Don’t believe me? Pro-LeBron: Windhorst, Perkins, McMeniman. Anti-LeBron: Skip Bayless, Stephen A (While Kobe was playing) and Rob Parker. Pro-KD: Jay Williams Anti-KD: Nick Wright, Shannon Sharpe. Pro Kobe: Jim Gray, Stephen A, Anti-Kobe: Jason Whitlock, Bill Simmons. But now, every player knows to get at least one guy in your corner to act almost as your free PR man, and reporters know to do it to keep their career in the limelight.
Michael Jordan used Ahmad Rashad to get important interviews and memos out into the public, and it worked so well for Rashad’s career that most people under 35 don’t even know that he was a former NFL player. Rashad had a level of access to Jordan no one else did in the 1990s, and was basically on call if Jordan badly needed something stated publicly. Chris Haynes, who always played second fiddle to Adrian Wojnarowski and Shams Charania at Yahoo, latched on to Damian Lillard and has broken every big story about Lillard, including the subtle shot at Blazers management piece over the summer. This practice in itself isn’t inherently bad, but it starts to become downright ridiculous when real life stuff gets affected. Take for example the voting for various NBA awards: Most everyone knows that Stephen Curry, with a below average roster around him, deserved first-team all NBA honors after leading the league in scoring. But when we peek at vote totals, we see Haynes placed a vote for Damian Lillard. He could think Lillard was the best point guard in the league last season, but what is more likely is this move brings cache to his relationship to Lillard and if he voted for Curry, word would get back to Lillard.
I’m not saying every reporter needs to be cookie-cutter, straight down the middle news machines, but the traditional reporter title is very seldom a thing anymore, because access is the name of the game. Rachel Nichols and Ramona Shelburne both admitted they are “narrative-based” voters, which basically means that because LeBron James gets our network the most attention because he’s on the Lakers, we need to craft stories to make his season seem worthy of an MVP. The one player as of now that hasn’t had this is Giannis Antetokounmpo, partially because he plays in a small market and is foreign, so he’s harder to market even though his story is most deserving of a narrative-based award. Brian Windhorst also went on podcasts talking about how James was “running away” with the MVP last year before his injury, which isn’t true to any sane basketball fan who watched Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokic put up monster numbers without a true superstar next to them. Because Giannis doesn’t really have a media member who is pro-Giannis as explained before, it made the manufactured Giannis hate blatantly obvious when ESPN tried to place Ryan Hollins as the “Giannis is overrated” guy, even though he just won two MVPs in a row. Hollins is no longer on the network.
When you have a majority of the news personalities and various NBA players represented by the same agency, news that gets out there is ones that isn’t necessarily by public demand but rather the agency’s best interest. Here’s an example: Rachel Nichols and several ESPN personalities are represented by CAA, a powerful agency for highly visible celebs. So is Leon Rose, the Knicks President, who was a former power broker at the agency and had several clients around the league like LeBron and Carmelo Anthony. So is Zion Williamson, who is growing increasingly frustrated with the New Orleans Pelicans. So what does ESPN decide to do? Pump non-stop stories about hypotheticals involving Zion to the Knicks, because its best for all parties involved. When you start connecting the dots its obvious that ESPN is no longer in the business of reporting news but creating it themselves and then reacting to every possible angle. Another example is Kendrick Perkins openly defending an agent (Rich Paul) on twitter that he supposedly has no connection to, yet went on a full PR cover campaign about Paul’s character when Knicks center Nerlens Noel filed a lawsuit against him. What is the reason for this other than they’re secretly paying you or you don’t want to lose access? Its an agent who doesn’t care about you otherwise.
The NBA TMZfication was unbearable the last few years largely because of the attention paid to a few and the smearing of anyone else. ESPN spends years shitting on the Warriors super-team but then tried to link every third star to the LeBron and AD Lakers. But it is not just ESPN, Adrian Wojnarowski openly hating the Lakers assets in trade deals on Twitter and making it clearly obvious he has access to Danny Ainge and the Boston front office during the AD saga was something. Editorializing reports is calculated: The more you do the team a solid, the better stories you’ll get in the future.
Wojnarowski has a history of being a PR shill for a team. Before Twitter became really popular, Wojnarowski had almost exclusive access to the Detroit Pistons and their-then General Manager Joe Dumars. Dumars helped build the Pistons title core in the mid 2000s, but as his tenure went on the team spiraled into irrelevancy. Despite this, Woj published nothing but puff pieces and tweets like these ones below, even if the transactions made no sense.
His coverage of the Pistons was so positive, he even wrote a fluff piece on how Dumars trading for Iverson could attract LeBron to Detroit
The Pistons president doesn’t just have the salary cap space for the Cleveland Cavaliers star. He also has the connections and the championship credibility. Make no mistake: Detroit and Dumars are officially in hot pursuit of James – maybe even the favorite now – and it promises to be a long, agonizing two years for the Cavaliers.
Detroit doesn’t deliver the bright lights and global metropolis destination that James wants when he opts out of his contract in 2010, but two more years of watching Kobe Bryant win titles could transform his priorities. James wants badly to be considered the best player on the planet and that won’t happen until he’s a champion.
James wants a front office with a vision that honors his greatness, and make no mistake: This makes Detroit and Dumars so dangerous, makes them Cleveland’s worst nightmare. The city could justify losing its prodigal son to New York or Los Angeles, but nearby Detroit?
Who the fuck thought the Pistons were favorite in the LeBron James sweepstakes? Woj did. This is the problem with modern league media, and it has been going on well before Rachel Nichols and Nick Wright started twisting weird narratives to anyone who threatened LeBron winning a title. What made Woj’s shilling for Dumars so hilarious is that it ended up costing Dumars a hefty fine from the NBA:
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. So listen, if it’s not agencies or players themselves, these guys are all being string-pullers for executives.
The other big NBA news titan, Shams Charania, is younger but just as guilty of doing the same things as Wojnarowski. Being a Chicago native and starting his career writing Bulls blogs and attending the NBA draft combine in Chicago to build his network, Charania does have some soft spots for the Derrick Rose-led Bulls teams he grew up watching. He rose to prominence under Wojnarowski at Yahoo, but now works for The Athletic and Stadium, a video-heavy sports company co-owned by… Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf. So Charania is being paid in one role by an NBA owner, which is a conflict of interest no matter how you slice it. After allegations into assault and injured led to Rose’s career being turned sideways, Charania published a strategically timed puff-piece about Rose and his side of the story. Why? Well the Stadium was in the middle of producing a documentary about Derrick Rose, which features Charania. He retweeted this promotion and used The Athletic article to get Rose’s press out there more:
The day before, he plugged it on Chicago sports radio station 670 The Score. “We also have a Derrick Rose documentary coming, too,” he said. “It should be a fun project.” This again is why when you follow the deeper connection at work, none of this comes across as authentic at all, as Charania wouldn’t speak bad about Reinsdorf’s former franchise player.
Just when you think people would try to be discreet about trying to get the media in their corner, after signing Kawhi Leonard and Paul George in the summer of 2019, Steve Ballmer went on a full-court press to promote “LA Our Way” by making the Clippers seem street tough from GTA San Andreas. In order to get buzz around the team, he sent high-level media members (more got the jerseys including Colin Cowherd, but didn’t show them on set) the new city edition jerseys with the San Andreas font to promote them and generate topic points around the Clippers:
I can’t definitively say this led to more Pro-Clippers bias or more coverage than there would have normally been, but what it does show is the lengths that teams can control and use media platforms to get whatever they want promoted out there. And if certain narratives are popular and a side needs to be taken, reporters or talking heads will go to great lengths (likely side payments or more access to exclusives) to do it:
Look, I know it’s part of his schtick, but Bayless openly admitted that Uncle Dennis, Kawhi’s trusted advisor, reached out to him and asked him why he was hating on Kawhi so much. Because he realized he needed to support LeBron’s main city rival, he pivoted and gave free air time by promoting the new Kawhi New Balance shoes. Does anyone find a problem with this? I do, which is why to me all the reporters and talking heads are just one right situation away from doing the PR dirty work to launch their own careers, or to keep them afloat. And with this, the entire media landscape suffers.