Adrian Wojnarowski

Adrian Wojnarowski (/wɜːrdʒˈnaʊski/ wurj-NOW-skee; born March 4, 1969), nicknamed Woj (/woʊdʒ/ WOHJ), is an American basketball executive and former sports columnist and reporter. During his years as an NBA insider for ESPN and Yahoo! Sports, he became one of the NBA's preeminent reporters. Wojnarowski is largely credited with ushering in an era of Twitter-driven, breaking news-focused NBA reporting, in which top reporters are NBA celebrities in their own right. He retired from reporting in 2024 and is currently the general manager of the St. Bonaventure Bonnies men's basketball team.

Wojnarowski was born in Bristol, Connecticut, on March 4, 1969. His parents were Polish immigrants. He graduated from Bristol Central High School in 1987 and from St. Bonaventure University in Allegany, New York, in 1991. He was named St. Bonaventure's alumnus of the year in 2019, and received an honorary doctorate from the university in 2022.

Wojnarowski currently lives in Glen Rock, New Jersey with his wife, Amy, and their two children, Ben and Annie. He met Amy, who graduated from St. Bonaventure in 1992, through the college newspaper.

In December 2024, Wojnarowski revealed that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in March of the same year.

Wojnarowski began his career working for the Hartford Courant starting as a high school senior and continuing during college holidays. During his time in college, he interned at the Olean Times Herald in 1989, where the sports department put him to use writing highly critical pieces of St. Bonaventure's basketball team. After graduating from college, he wrote for some smaller papers before becoming a columnist for the Fresno Bee in 1995.

In 1997, he began to work for The Record in New Jersey. As a result of his work with The Record, he was named "Columnist of the Year" in 1997 and in 2002 by the Associated Press Sports Editors. During that time, he also contributed regularly to ESPN.com. In 2006, he published a New York Times best-seller: The Miracle of St. Anthony: A Season with Coach Bob Hurley and Basketball's Most Improbable Dynasty. On June 20, 2019, Wojnarowski was awarded the inaugural Tony Kubek Award for Media Excellence by the National Polish-American Sports Hall of Fame in Michigan.

In 2007, Wojnarowski left The Record and joined Yahoo! Sports full-time. In March 2009, he and Dan Wetzel wrote a story tying the Connecticut Huskies men's basketball program to several recruiting violations. In 2010 the New York Post reported that Wojnarowski was being sued by the Penguin Group for failing to meet a deadline for a book covering the life of coach Jim Valvano. Wojnarowski responded that the problem was "a miscommunication between my agent and me" and said that he would be returning the money to Penguin Books.

Over time, Wojnarowski shifted his emphasis from opinions columns to breaking news. He was widely considered one of the best NBA "scoopers"—that is, he was frequently the first to report NBA signings, trades, and draft picks, which gave him a large advantage in the fast-moving social media space where "algorithms often prioritize being first, ... gain[ing] him tens of thousands of extra clicks." He was so well-connected that on at least one occasion, a team executive said that his staff learned of a new signing from Wojnarowski before he had even announced it to the team. His speed made him an Internet celebrity, and his scoops were referred to as "Woj Bombs"; his Twitter followers would sometimes respond to his breaking news tweets with "nuclear explosion" gifs for comedic effect. Wojnarowski flexed his reporting muscle by repeatedly reporting NBA draft picks before the league announced them on its annual live telecast, which he continued to do (in a more comedic form) after joining NBA broadcasting partner ESPN.