A blockbuster NBA trade without 'Woj Bomb': 'I turn off my phone when I go to sleep'

On Friday evening, just before training camp began, a blockbuster trade with the NBA occurred. But there was no “Woj Bomb” to go with it.

In the first major deal in the NBA since Adrian Wojnarowski announced his retirement from the sports press last week to become GM of the St. Bonaventure men's basketball team, the Knicks acquired New Jersey native Karl-Anthony Towns in exchange for Julius Randle and Donte brought home DiVincenzo and a first-round pick.

Had the blockbuster trade happened a week earlier, or even just a few days earlier, Woj likely would have blown it up with a “Woj bomb” on social media.

Instead, The Athletic broke the story at 10:14 p.m., while ESPN's Bobby Marks, who first reported Woj in the NBA to Yahoo! committed to publish the story. before bringing it to ESPN, he tweeted at 10:15 a.m.

Woj? He spent part of the evening on campus with his old ESPN colleague Jeff Passan, whose son is a St. Bonaventure baseball target. Woj may have already turned off his phone for the night when the deal fell through.

“The last few nights I've been doing something I haven't done in a long time, which is turning off my phone when I go to sleep,” Woj, 55, told Frank Isola and Brian Scalabrine on “The Starting Lineup.” on SiriusXM NBA Radio. “It would always be on, it could be buzzing all night long, and there's no call that I can't handle at 6 a.m. or 5:30 a.m. when I wake up. And that was a pretty good feeling too.”

In fact, Woj's Twitter was dark after Friday night's trading and into early Saturday morning.

Woj's priorities are no longer stopping NBA trades and free agency signings. They prepare the St. Bonaventure men's basketball team for continued success through the transfer portal and NIL opportunities.

He joked on the radio that one of his main tasks now was to get lunch for coach Mark Schmidt and his staff.

“I've retired from ESPN and the news industry, but this isn't a retirement job … we're here to compete and win, the St. Bonaventure way,” he said at his introductory news conference Wednesday.

Wojnarowski began his writing career for The Hartford Courant while in college and then worked for The Waterbury (Connecticut) Republican-American, The Fresno Bee and The Bergen Record. He also wrote the best-selling book “The MIracle of St. Anthony,” which chronicled Hall of Fame coach Bob Hurley's St. Anthony dynasty.

When he arrived at Yahoo! He had a national platform to cover the NBA and became the preeminent news anchor in the area. He later moved to ESPN, where he developed an intriguing rivalry with his former protégé Shams Charania of The Athletic.

He said he noticed a change in the industry around the time he left newspapers, focusing less on writing columns and features and more on hard news and transactions.

“I was still writing columns at Yahoo!, but eventually I became much less focused on opinion, and the audience developed an insatiable hunger for information that became a 24/7 job,” he told Isola and Scalabrine.

Still, Wojnarowski had been advising Schmidt and his associates for years, and this increased in the NIL era. This summer, he decided he would simply enjoy serving as GM of the basketball team at his alma mater, a place he loves, more.

“I think that maybe we’re all meant to do more than one thing in our lives,” Wojnarowski said, “and I’m more sure of that now than ever.”

Now his focus is on attracting and retaining talent at St. Bonaventure. He told Scalabrine that he planned to check out his AAU team, while Isola joked that Wojnarowski was a year late in recruiting Cooper Flagg, the projected No. 1 pick in 2025, to the Bonnies.

“You did so many things right, but you messed up one thing: If you had done this a year earlier, Cooper Flagg would be on campus,” Isola said, adding that he would have been the assistant GM.

“No, I’m on time,” Wojnarowski replied. “I’m on time.”

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Adam Zagoria is a freelance reporter covering Seton Hall and NJ college basketball for NJ Advance Media. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamZagoria and check out his website ZAGSBLOG.com.