One of basketball journalism’s most prolific reporters is making moves.
According to Deadspin, Yahoo! Sports’ NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski has approached a number of basketball writers over the past few weeks and pitched them on joining a new independent basketball website that he is drawing up.
Wojnarowski would be making the same moves as former ESPN columnist Chris Sheridan, who left the company to create Sheridan Hoops in the summer of 2011, and since its inception, has 15 staff writers.
It’s unclear what Wojnarowski’s website would look like or who would fund it, but it sounds like it is being modeled on Sports Illustrated’s MMQB, the extremely successful football-only standalone site led by Peter King, which has a staff of around 10.
More from Deadspin:
The Big Lead’s Jason McIntyre, a former colleague of Wojnarowski’s at The Record (Bergen County, NJ), reports that FOX, ESPN, and Sports Illustrated are all courting Wojnarowski, but it is also highly unlikely that ESPN, who had conversations with Wojnarowski’s agent when his contract was up in 2012, would pursue Wojnarowski, given the many problems with their own personality-driven websites. For his part, Wojnarowski has a well-known disdain for ESPN.
Wojnarowski signed a contract with Yahoo in 2012, and it expires during this coming offseason. If Wojnarowski is looking for writers, this summer is as good of a time as any to find them. The contracts of the four basketball writers Bleacher Report hired two years ago in their push for increased quality—Howard Beck, Kevin Ding, Ethan Skolnick, Jared Zwerling—are up soon. Meanwhile, Grantland’s basketball crew—Jonathan Abrams, Zach Lowe, Kirk Goldsberry, and assorted others—are said to be hesitant of their future at ESPN after Bill Simmons’s unceremonious ouster.
Basketball players are not the only ones that have agents and make the headlines, it seems.
