Adrian Wojnarowski is the biggest newsbreaker covering the NBA, the most gossipy sport in the U.S. But he apparently isn’t one to brag about how much time he spends on his phone as a means of showing off how hard he works.
In an interview on Pardon My Take released Wednesday, Wojnarowski came out swinging against people who use their screen time as a badge of honor.
“Can I say something about screen time? Who gives a f***? Who gives a f*** how much screen time you have?” Wojnarowski said. “I’ve never turned that on. It’s like NBA teams bragging about cap space and how many draft picks we have, are we going to hang banners? Like, ‘here’s what our screen time was.'”
Is Woj taking a shot at his fellow insiders here?
His rival NBA insider and protegeé Shams Charania is known to talk up his screen time, including in an Instagram post during NBA free agency last year — and in a profile in New York Magazine last fall.
Considering Charania is the most public face of the screen time “wars” and clearly disliked by Wojnarowski, it doesn’t seem like a stretch that Woj would go out of his way to take a subtle shot at Charania on a huge sports podcast.
Later in the interview, Woj again tried to downplay the hype around sports newsbreakers when asked about his sleep schedule.
“During free agency or trade deadline, it’s minimal. The rest of the year, this idea that you can’t sleep as an insider, it’s bulls***,” Wojnarowski added. “I think some people want to create a mythology around this thing, there’s a lot of demanding jobs.”
Given Woj’s previous NBA media feuds, he is certainly no stranger to the cutthroat nature of sports insiders. But apparently bragging about how much someone is on their phone is a bridge too far.