For years, the NBA Draft has been better to follow on Twitter than it is on the ESPN television broadcast, simply because you get information much quicker, knowing about picks and trades long before they get announced on air.
Adrian Wojnarowski is the one who started all that more than a decade ago, and now the likes of Shams Charania and other newsbreakers all vie for who can be first to get the picks before they happen. The problem for Woj is, he now works for ESPN and is part of the Draft broadcast. As such, in recent years Woj has broken out the thesaurus and cheekily tipped picks without saying definitively what was going to happen. However, that still involves a lot of work that distracts him from his main job on television, and as he explained to Ryen Russillo on the Ringer’s Ryen Russillo Podcast, this year he won’t even be doing that.
For this year’s NBA draft, @wojespn will NOT be tweeting out each pick.
He explained why to @ryenarussillo: pic.twitter.com/Sum4JxgmYw
— The Ringer (@ringer) June 15, 2023
He notes that he’ll still handle any craziness at the top of the draft this year, as there’s a chance for multiple trades involving top-5 picks, but as for trying to hit all 30 first round picks, Woj won’t be part of that race. NBA Twitter will surely still get those scoops from Shams, Chris Haynes, Marc Stein, and others, but not from the man who started it all.
It’ll be interesting to see if that makes for an improvement on the broadcast, as more of his reporting can be focused on getting it on-air rather than on Twitter. ESPN has done a better job in recent years of announcing trades that are happening on the desk sooner than they used to on the broadcast, although the NBA still won’t let a trade be official until the trade call, meaning players getting traded still get the hat of a team they aren’t going to on the stage.
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