Not sure why we would put Woj in the same bucket with SAS. Smith is an opinion machine. It’s his bit. Say something so extreme it starts a conversation. There are no “Smith bombs”. When I see a Woj bomb I can pretty much take to the bank that thewhat he said is going to happen is going to happen. Seems like reporting to me.
This is what I was thinking. What our opinions are of Woj, he's a reporter who created a brand based on being first at reporting. Shams is similar.
SAS and most of the rest of ESPN is just hot take, talking head bs. I can't stand it and wish fewer people tuned in for the crap.
Fixed that for you.
Woj does get points for being able to finish a sentence that doesn’t read like an AI trained on Bleacher Report articles run through Google translate.
But both of them are just access merchants.
There is value in knowing what is real and what is chum put out by a player, a team, an agent to move a narrative. How many stories do you read speculating about this trade or that trade? Shams and Woj don’t let themselves be part of that. Maybe it’s not deep investigative journalism, but it is actually breaking news, with some judgement about what to broadcast. We’d be a lot better off if everybody had the same filter.
At the same time, there is also value in not rushing to break every story and actually seeking to confirm with sources. Woj is the one who first reported a consensual relationship, which is what started the rampant speculation, and at best it was more complicated than that. Reaching out to the Celtics first for comment, rather than tweeting, would be a much better journalistic practice in this instance, and is how news organizations would function.
how do you know he didn't and how do you know who is source is?
Occam’s razor: the source is someone in Ime’s camp to 1) get ahead of the story and 2) muddy the waters and force the C’s into a tricky position where a “technically correct” statement isn’t possible to reply to during an expected media cycle because it might compromise future action.
I've mentioned this before. Who would have most to gain from leaking this story to Woj at 10pm on Wed night, the day that the law firm the Cs commissioned came down with their finding? And how was the story leaked? This is the exact wording of Woj's bomb:
"Suspension" for a "consensual relationship". First thing people think is that Ime is being suspended for a workplace affair. But for a year! Obviously the first response is, why? Why's he being suspended for something that two consenting adults did, that happens in every workplace in America? So the narrative is set by then. Ime is being harshly treated.
Then we find out more, from Shams, the next day:
But this report is in the Athletic, behind a paywall. So much fewer people see it. Shams didn't make reference to the "unwanted comments" in his tweet about the article:
So there were a number of leaks, the first one was to Woj, the second to Shams. Who benefited from the initial leak to Woj that made Ime look like he was being hard done by? Would the Celtics gain from it? Or would Ime gain? Did Woj know about the non-consensual part, or did he not bother to ask because he wanted to be the first to drop the story?
The second leak to Shams provides more clarity and details, but Shams put it behind the Athletic paywall.
Then Brad and Wyc hold a presser on Friday but they don't share any details, other than that it was a violation of rules, there was more than one violation, there was nobody other than Ime who committed the violations, that it was serious enough to deem a year punishment appropriate, and that Ime accepted the gravity of the punishment.
I really can't see how the initial leak benefited the Cs. I think Ime had the most to gain by doing that. It's more likely that the leak to Shams came from someone in the Cs organization, to defend the length of the suspension without running afoul of NDAs or other legal restraints on disclosing information. But they took too long to have their press conference to clarify certain details that they could publicly disclose. By letting a day lapse their female employees bore the brunt of social media and media speculation about who it was. Even now many people probably don't know that Ime was punished for something that appears to be non-consensual, you can tell from the comments on this site alone that not everyone has an Athletics sub and they don't know what details to believe.
