Spoiler Alert!
How Adrian Wojnarowski & Co.’s tweets are ruining the NBA’s last bastion of surprise.
Let’s start with a caveat: Reporters breaking NBA news is, by and very large, a wonderful thing. Not only does it achieve the baseline goal of informing the basketball viewing public; it affords those writers and reporters without high-level access the ability to tease and untangle the underlying narrative threads much more quickly and—it is hoped—accurately.
If Bismack Biyombo decides to retire from the NBA to become a keyboardist for Foghat, we want to know about it. Immediately. Chris Kaman endorsed a new line of Nikes? Fire that shit out there, “nukes” auto-correct and all. Lawrence Frank gets a new office in the storage closet next to the nacho cheese machine? Get Darren Rovell on the horn, STAT!
Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, we want the scoops. Because we are fans and we are fiends, and not necessarily in that order.
But announcing draft picks before they happen? If there’s a line to be drawn in this admittedly nebulous universe of instantaneous NBA scoops, it’s here.
We’ve all been there, waiting for Team X to make Pick Y, scrambling for an educated guess after two or three free-falls upset the mock-draft order. We wait in sweaty anticipation for the commissioner to make the call—quadruply so if it’s our team on the clock. We quickly rifle through Twitter to make one last point about Prospect Z…
And then, BLAM!
NOOOOOOOOOOO! WHY?!
Hey, Woj, you just scooped the rest of the universe by 12 whole seconds! Congratulations!
Not, mind you, because doing so serves the public’s interest in spinning and synthesizing the information into a body of multilayered discourse—and reportage, in the media’s case—but because you can. It’s the Twitter equivalent of running up the score or rattling off the names of your boats to some Applebee’s bartender. What, exactly, are you trying to prove?
To be clear: I admire the hell out of Woj’s work—the breaking news, the in-depth profiles, all of it. I love my #WojBombs just as much as the next guy. Draft-day trades after the picks have transpired, teams thinking about trading up or down: fair game all. Particularly given the absurd complexity of the league’s CBA.
Just…Can we just have this one thing? Please?
The relationship between basketball Twitter and the NBA news cycle is, for the most part, a productive one—healthy, even. It’s both a forum for anticipating and reacting to emerging stories, and the filter through which rumor is rendered truth and speculation exposed.
If I have a choice between hearing about a trade or hire or arrest from a plugged-in reporter right now or through a team press release in five days, I fancy the former. The more time the media has to respond, the more accurate and compelling the information. That’s the hope, anyway. But when you’re talking about a matter of seconds—literally seconds—what’s the point?
Part of the charm of the draft lies in split-second moments, of families and fans hanging on the first syllable after “select” with sweat on the palms and lumps in the throat. By breaking names, Wojnarowski and his competitors are depriving people of a singular moment which, while silly on the surface, serves a very real function of fandom: the element of surprise.
Cue the all-too-predictable retort: If you don’t want to hear who’s being picked, temporarily un-follow the account. While you’re at it, be sure to accurately predict which of the hundreds of people you follow might re-tweet said information, and un-follow them as well.
Better yet, stay off Twitter altogether. Nobody’s forcing you to witness their unrivaled ability to relay information mere moments before it becomes public knowledge.
The problem with that logic, of course, is that it presupposes a pretty flagrant power dynamic. Just because you have the better sources doesn’t mean you have to act on the info. Is doesn’t imply ought. By announcing picks before they happen, you’re not only dictating the temporal terms by which one receives the information—not to mention denying people the thrill of the build-up—you’re saying the seconds by which you beat the Barclays microphone is more important than everyone else’s social media experience.
Prematurely tweeting out picks might help content producers, for example. But the reason it helps them is precisely because everyone else is getting the same early information. Had the tweets not been sent, writers and bloggers would still be operating on the same playing field. The content is still going to come out in short order.
Furthermore, it’s not as if refraining from breaking picks somehow compromises one’s journalistic clout. This isn’t the same thing as acting on a scoop about a player getting arrested, for example. Because we had no idea that information was coming to begin with. Nor does it mean conceding to the production rights of a media rival (ESPN, in this case). Beat them at the real game—the hot takes and interpretations thereof. That’s what people will remember.
Simply put, when it comes to the draft, there’s only one purpose served in spoiling the surprise: trumpeting one’s status. That doesn’t make the reporter a bad person. It’s just really annoying.
Think about it from a pure utilitarian perspective. What’s going to piss more people off: preemptively tweeting out the picks to millions a full minute before they’re announced, regardless of whether they care to hear it live or not, or having those who prefer a Twitter-only experience—people who eschew watching ESPN, for instance—find out about it one minute seconds after the fact?
If your stance is that it doesn’t matter where the information comes from (as may be claimed by those who don’t watch ESPN), then isn’t it in the general interest of everyone—including those who value the combined TV-Twitter experience—to have the tweets come after the pick is officially announced?
Wherever you fall on that question, it’s hard to believe the reputations of Wojnarowski and his peers would somehow be negatively impacted by reporting the pick after the fact. They’re being paid for their ability to turn exception sources into compelling content, not for tweeting faster than Adam Silver can walk to the podium.
As the NBA and other leagues expand in revenue and structural complexity, it’s inevitable that the growth in attendant media will succeed in further subsuming the unexpected. The more eyes that are fixed upon you, the less likely you are to do or say what hasn’t already been seen or said.
Which is why the draft is and should remain—outside of actual games—the NBA’s sole bastion of surprise, where a single strategic deviation can yield genuinely chaotic consequences. But when those consequences are spoiled at each and every turn by a handful of people who believe it necessary to maintaining their unquestioned industry hegemony, we lose a little something as fans.
The time between the tweet and the TV handshake might be measured in seconds. At a certain point, though, it’s worth asking whether we’ve crossed the line from spoiling mere moments—fleeting as we in the media are often trained and paid to make them—to spoiling the spirit.