How The NBA Flushed Out The Exec Leaking Memos To Adrian Wojnarowski

Our own Kevin Draper—who really should have written this for us— goes in on Yahoo scoop-machine Adrian Wojnarowski at The New Republic. You'll read it, because Woj deserves some going-in upon. But this paragraph, from an entire section on Wojnarowski's cozy relationship with longtime Pistons executive Joe Dumars, deserves special attention.

In 2010, the NBA fined Dumars $500,000 for leaking multiple confidential league memos to Wojnarowski, according to multiple sources. This matches the third largest publicly known fine the league has ever handed down. The NBA decided that too many memos were making it into the media, so they conducted a sting operation over several months. They would change a few words or numbers in different team's copies of otherwise identical memos, so that when the memos leaked they could spot the small differences and trace them back to the leaker. This approach caught Dumars red-handed, as well as an executive from another team who was fined $12,500 for leaking to a draft-focused website. Joe Dumars, the Detroit Pistons, and the NBA all declined to comment on the fine.

That's devious and incredible. The NBA was so mad that Woj was getting so much stuff, they distributed 30 insensibly different memos to 30 teams, just to see which one showed up on Yahoo. Straight out of le Carré. And it worked!

Anyway, go read the thing. And then start reading between the lines on every Woj story.