J.A. Adande will be honored with the Curt Gowdy Print Media Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the Hall announced on Friday. Adande and his fellow 2024 Gowdy Award winners will be honored at the Hall’s annual enshrinement ceremony later this year.
The award, named after legendary broadcaster and Hall of Fame president Curt Gowdy, is bestowed upon a journalist in print and broadcast media each year. Adande will be honored for his contributions as a reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times and Washington Post and as a columnist at the Los Angeles Times and ESPN for two decades.
Congratulations to 2024 Curt Gowdy Print Media Award recipient, J.A. Adande. #GowdyAward pic.twitter.com/IyPgUlrgpC
— Basketball HOF (@Hoophall) February 16, 2024
Adande, who now works as the director of the sports journalism program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Chicago, responded to the announcement on X (formerly Twitter).
“Speechless,” he wrote.
Speechless https://t.co/fsNy4qOUBh
— J.A. Adande (@jadande) February 16, 2024
The Gowdy award is given to media professionals who “have made a significant contribution to the game of basketball.” Adande covered the Chicago Bulls dynasty as a local beat writer for the Sun-Times before covering the Los Angeles Lakers dynasty for the LA Times before covering the NBA at the national level for ESPN. In between, he covered the NBA for the Post.
Later, Adande’s profile would grow while working as a sideline reporter at ESPN and a panelist on Around the Horn.
Since leaving ESPN in 2017, Adande has led the Medill School and shepherded a new generation of sports journalists into the field. He still does side projects here and there, including podcasts on the Dream Team and the 1990s Bulls.
Adande now will have the chance to have his career celebrated this August by the Basketball Hall of Fame.
