It’s not an especially big surprise that Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN broke the news of James Harden’s trade to the Los Angeles Clippers. Wojnarowski is usually pretty good at being first on things of this magnitude, and on the most recent episode of The Woj Pod, he broke down the extremely unpleasant work that went into reporting this one out.
You see, Wojnarowski sent out a tweet at 2:01 a.m. EST saying the trade happened, so he was obviously up extremely late working on this one. But as it turns out, in order to get the word of this one out there, he had to spend far far far far far too much time at Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey.
“They were grinding through this, really got into it on Monday night,” Wojnarowski said at the 5:09 mark of the pod. “I was at Newark Airport, I was getting ready to fly to L.A. to go out and be out with our NBA Countdown crew this week and NBA Today, and was suggested to me to not get on a plane, that you might be … it’s always my worst fear with this job, is you’re in a plane, and the wireless is spotty, and you can’t get to what you need to do. So, I sat in Newark Airport, watched the place close down and then almost start to reopen again. So, from like 5 p.m., they threw me out of the concierge lounge — or the United lounge, I should say — at around 10:30 p.m. when it closed, and then I just went and sat downstairs until I left about 3:30 in the morning.”
Wojnarowski said at that point he just went home, and at the time of the episode getting published, he was still figuring out when he’s getting on a flight to Los Angeles. He also compared this deal to the one that the two teams worked on in 2019, where the Clippers sent Tobias Harris to the Sixers in the very early hours of the morning.
Now, as someone who is from the great state of New Jersey, my jaw hit the floor when I heard this story, as I do not think there is anything I would dislike to do more than spending nearly 12 hours — many of them during the overnight hours — sitting in the Newark Airport because of a work thing. But there is a reason that Woj is much better at his job than I am at mine, so ultimately, I salute him and hope he’s not stuck at the airport nearly as long the next time he makes his way to Newark.
[h/t Awful Announcing]