The Los Angeles Lakers’ head coaching search has been filled with plenty of drama to keep feeding the content machines, largely due to conflicting reports from top NBA insiders Adrian Wojnarowski and Shams Charania.
With Charania deep into reporting ESPN’s JJ Redick was the favorite to land the job, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski dropped a Woj bomb last week, claiming UConn’s Dan Hurley was the Lakers’ top target. The news appeared out of nowhere for seemingly everyone except Wojnarowski who reported Hurley was the Lakers’ frontrunner all along, labeling every other candidate as a “due diligence” interview, subsequently implying Charania has been out of the loop.
But in the wake of Hurley declining the Lakers’ offer, Wojnarowski’s reporting has been met with some skepticism, particularly as he conducts interviews with a book about Dan’s father sitting behind him. Did Wojnarowski report Hurley to the Lakers because it was true? Did he report it to get Hurley better leverage as he negotiated his contract with UConn? Did he report it to get the Lakers better leverage as they negotiated with Redick? Or did he report it because Wojnarowski hates being scooped?
Amin Elhassan joined Ethan Sherwood Strauss on the latest episode of House of Strauss and implied it may have been the latter.
“When you position yourself as the holder, the purveyor of the breaking transaction…then infallibility is almost compulsory. ‘I can never get it wrong. It just changes, and I’ll let you know when it changes,’” Elhassan said.
In the case of the Lakers’ coaching search this offseason, Wojnarowski was not the purveyor of the breaking transaction, even though the supposed leading candidate was his ESPN colleague. That is until he dropped the out-of-nowhere Hurley report and briefly regained his claim as the purveyor of the breaking transaction.
“Adrian really hates to get scooped on sh*t that should have been his,” Elhassan told Strauss. “When that stuff happens and it doesn’t go through the way station that is Adrian Wojnarowski, that seems to perturb him even more than the usual ‘I just got scooped because I wasn’t in on it.’”
Elhassan claimed this wasn’t the first example of Wojnarowski believing he “can never get it wrong,” citing Gordon Hayward’s signing with the Celtics in 2017. With Chris Haynes, then at ESPN, reporting Hayward to Boston was a done deal, Wojnarowski reported a decision wasn’t made.
“But he doesn’t frame it like that,” Elhassan said of Wojnarowski refuting Haynes’ Hayward report. “He frames it very clearly like ‘That’s not the correct report. This is the correct report.’”
And that’s exactly how he framed his Hurley report. It wasn’t, ‘Dan Hurley emerged as a late candidate for the Lakers’ head coaching job.’ Wojnarowski framed it in a way to make it seem like Hurley was always the leading candidate while everyone who Charania reported on was just a “due diligence” interview.
Elhassan also provided the example of James Harden being traded from the Brooklyn Nets to the Philadelphia 76ers. Brian Windhorst reported the trade was in its final stages, whereas Wojnarowski came out and said the two teams haven’t even spoken to each other. Hours later, the deal was done, implying the Nets and Sixers were indeed talking as Windhorst previously reported.
According to Elhassan, 76ers president of basketball operations Daryl Morey is a known source of Wojnarowski and the ESPN NBA insider felt he should have been the one to get that scoop. Just like he felt he should have been the one to get the scoop on Redick, his ESPN colleague.
We should note this isn’t the first time Elhassan was critical of Wojnarowski. In 2021, Elhassan ripped Wojnarowski for reportedly calling Rachel Nichols a “bad teammate,” claiming ESPN’s top NBA insider wasn’t a good teammate himself. “Do we want to talk about the Black careers that he put a foot on because he was threatened by?” Elhassan said of Wojnarowski in 2021. “Do we want to talk about that?”
Everyone hates to lose and the insider business is a dirty one. But if Wojnarowski managed to contrive this entire Hurley story to recover from missing out on the Redick scoop, that’s a next-level sort of vindictiveness. If Wojnarowski holds enough influence that he was able to foster mutual interest between the Lakers and Hurley, culminating in a $70 million contract offer, all in the name of one-upping Charania, then perhaps he holds way too much power inside the NBA.
