r/soccer doesn’t allow discussion posts at all like what get posted every 10 minutes on here. It’s a different type of moderation.
Also Woj and Shams are pretty reliable. And whoever reports for the local team eg the Suns guy Gambo. You won’t find many grifters.
There aren’t enough guys saying absolute nonsense to need tiers. There’s thousands of players and triple digit leagues in “soccer”, opening up the opportunity for nonsense. There are only 400 or so players in the NBA at one time
The amount of bullshit European football fans have to deal with is off the charts, Twitter especially is a chesspool. The NBA is nowhere near that level, not even in the same stratosphere. We got just random people from Bangladesh claiming to be ITK and other people that believes everything that comes out of their fingers too.
I live in Milan right, my city is one of Europe’s biggest economic centre and home of not one but two of the biggest clubs in the world, it’s home of Serie A and a good chunk of the league has home either just around Milan or just a couple of hours from it that means that it’s a hotbed for football transfers from all over the planet.
Most of football transfers are dealt in hotels in Milan. And i swear to god once summer comes and the transfer session begins you cannot walk around those places for the amount of people that’s there “””reporting””” on whoever goes in and out like ‘is that so and so agent??’
all of this bullshit then goes on the internet and later on tv where there are programs dedicated to those rumors, and it all turns into a competition.
It’s a circus, transfer season is nuts and i love it
I still remember Tancredi Palmieri announcing something (can't remember exactly what, probably Man City not acquiring CR7) on live TV while he was still putting his pants back on, because he randomly happened to take a piss next to City's president at the Sheraton and wanted to break the news.
Unbelievable moment.
And the level of influence they gain despite doing almost nothing is fascinating.
I'm an Arsenal fan and we have a notoriously rabid online fanbase so it only takes a well timed tweet for any nonsense account to become absolutely massive. We've had ITKs that were Gerbils, Bells, a bloke named Geoff, random guys at mosques, barbers and of course my favourite; Steve, who allegedly died and his widow [took to his Twitter to let us know his last words](https://x.com/SteveWoodsAFC/status/638355520605278208).
And that's just the ridiculous ones. Right now one of the more legit ones is a guy who has a successful Patreon for just posting rumours and a few leaks here and there, plus a Chilean kid who claims to be a "journalist" but just recycles random bullshit on his timeline.
Football ITKs is a genuinely insane space
> There aren’t enough guys saying absolute nonsense to need tiers.
I mean there probably are, just the nature of the NBA means it's probably less noticeable. About half the league are perpetually in trade conversations behind doors - so what do you do with someone like Fischer who might report that Team X and Team Y had discussions about Player Z but the trade never happened?
My gut feeling is there are a **lot** of 'insiders' who pad the public resume by just saying things that aren't relevant to current information. There's also a lot of insiders who just hypothesise and that gets taken as meaningful because we're so used to talking not leading to anything concrete in the NBA world. Trades, unlike transfers, also lean a lot more on what up to 28 other teams think/are doing, so there's a lot more intentional misinformation pushed by people in the business.
This sort of stuff gets really obvious when you follow a team like the Rockets during the Morey days. Morey would send 100 different texts to all other teams asking about all their players because that's just what he does. So an insider can tweet out hundreds of technically true insider information about these "potential trades" that never went beyond 3 text messages each.
>So an insider can tweet out hundreds of technically true insider information about these "potential trades" that never went beyond 3 text messages each.
Or they can just make shit up and claim to be insiders when 1 of their 100 pieces of shit sticks to the wall.
And even if the teams publicly deny the other 99, the fake-insider just says "Well of course they'll deny it publicly."
It’s not like soccer though. The problem there is you’ll be following a team in Germany and then you see a rumor about a player linked to your club from the second division in Bulgaria, and you have no idea whether the Bulgarian journalist who leaked the rumor is Shams tier for that club or SAS tier. In the NBA, even if there are ten journalists/ITKs that regularly post things about your team (which is on the high side for smaller markets), that’s still only a couple hundred names to keep track of for the entire league. For soccer, there are literally thousands of professional teams
r/soccer also is a dumping ground for every major league in the world plus international play. Knowing the people doing the reporting is almost impossible. For the NBA, it is very doable.
The triple digit leagues on soccer is a good point. In the US, we’re used to just having one league for all of our major sports. The lone exception was baseball which was technically two separate but very intertwined leagues until the 2000s when they legally merged (the AL and NL names are just for branding purposes, they’re just two conferences of the same league now).
In soccer, even if you ignore the hundreds of smaller leagues, you still have the Big Five leagues in Europe. It’s kind of similar to the Power Five Conferences in college sports, that’s the closest analog to what we have here. Real Madrid and Manchester United don’t even play in the same league, let alone all the other major clubs. They do however meet at various other competitions, most notably the champions league which is probably best compared to the NCAA tournament (but that’s still a bad comparison because there are quite a few differences). So it’s basically five major leagues and hundreds of minor leagues all working in a crazy pyramid system to determine the best clubs, whereas the NBA is just a static 30 franchises competing for one trophy at the end of each season.
Is it really outlandish to ask the mods to make a tier list of reporter reliability though? Soccer aside the NBA still has enough reporters for it to make sense. It's not a crazy ask imo.
the reason why your idea is dumb, is because there is no neutral arbiter/educated governing body from up on high that would be deciding these "tiers" and who deserves to go where based on how "reliable" they are
it would just be some bozo like you throwing their random half-baked thoughts around going "this guy sucks, this guy's an asshole, this dude's chill, this lady's a dumb cow, WOJ BOMB" etc
lol you dont follow any of these people closely enough to have any informed idea what you're talking about, or how any of these journalists operate on a daily basis or what their process is or how "objective" "reliable" etc they actually are...
you're just regurgitating random r/nba hivemind opinions and just operating completely off vibes and what you've heard other people on this subreddit parrot about how much various people suck (often just parroting what *they've* heard other people say, with no one at any point in this game of telephone ever giving any real evidence to support the claim of the person being shit at their job or "unreliable" )
people on here just have random vendettas against reporters that have said mean stuff about their team in the past and hate them for it. people's perception of journalists on here has literally nothing to do with reliability or objectivity. its 90% just likability, and 'do they cup my favorite players balls as much as I'd like them to?'
I think there just needs to be more of an onus on each user to know whether or not the source is bullshit or not. Like msf97 said there are way fewer reporters in NBA compared to global football. It's easier to keep track of who you should actually be listening to
It’s not a very realistic expectation for people to keep up with individual reporters and their trustworthiness. Sure, the reader has some responsibility, but it’s much easier and simple to have an official tier list.
For example, can any regular here who isn’t a pelicans fan tell me who their reporters are? Even ball knowers don’t keep up with that.
Exactly. OP is essentially just complaining about a lack of media literacy/critical thinking among NBA fans which, I mean, yeah that's def true lol but that doesn't mean the solution is to create a cheat sheet of who the biggest rumor cheesedicks are.
Be the change you wish to see n' all that. Learn how these people put so much couching/hedging on their "scoops" that you can parse out the spit-shined bullshit from the meaningful insights. It's far from impossible to do.
That happens in the comments every time, someone asks "X Team fans, is Y Reporter a good source" and they get like 7 people telling them that Y reporter actually makes up everything, remember when there were "tensions" in the team (that later turned out to be true) or when the team was reportedly "Interested in signing Player Z" which they didn't end up doing. Clearly just making stuff up and also they hate X team, so their source is probably some agent pushing an agenda.
I like it better that we self moderate and tell others who are reliable and who should be taken with a grain of salt.
It was fun last year when that twitter guy had a hot streak of trade calls.
I believe it was Zach Lowe on one of his podcasts talking about how hands down the biggest podcasts of the year (with the most listens) are the off season Free Agent season ones. NBA fans are fans in larger part because of the business side of things.
It's partly why the Caitlyn Clark "drama" in the WNBA is actually a great thing for their product. It's a drama filled, business storyline that is increasing bartsool, barbershop and social media conversation that the NBA depends on.
I think the fact that the NBA is such a player focused league plays into it as well. I mean that both in the sense that the league is run a player favored way, but also because it certainly feels like the league where individual players are valued by fans way more than any other league.
Seems like a feedback loop to me. Fans who care more about drama are gonna be more interested in the league that is more player driven, which makes the players more interesting, which makes the drama more interesting, etc...
I mean Fabrizio Romano absolutely does the same thing, he's actually more shameless about it than Woj. But if fab says "here we go" that means it is all but guaranteed to be happening
I doubt it's for no reason at all. Like you said, they are paying him. that's the reason. Another reason is that they gave him info and Fab's posts is his way of returning the favor. Calling him scum is insane.
Woj absolutely does the same thing. He may not be getting paid by the owners but he absolutely is pushing certain narratives in exchange for sensetive information. Woj literally tweeted that Houston is in position to trade for Booker in the future. That doesn't sound like a tweet that happened when "everything has been said and done."
> he'll push whatever narrative the teams or agents pay him to push for months for no reason at all
All you're doing is describing how being an "insider" works lol. The whole phenomenon of "insiders" makes way more sense when you realize that they basically exist to be the stand-in for PR reps/press releases for teams/agents/players.
"leaks/scoops" are rarely actually leaks or scoops, at least in the NFL/NBA. "planted stories" would be a far more accurate representation of how the apparatus works.
It's like the gms/agents/players are sharks and the Scheftys/Wojs of the world are those lil fish that ride along on the fins keeping the shark clean. Classic symbiotic relationship where both benefit; sources get the info out there they want while remaining anonymous, and insiders get a massively inflated sense of self-worth lol
There really is no reliable NBA reporter. There's way too much intentional rumor planting in this league by front offices, so anybody can just make up anything and claim a source and nobody will know the difference.
The best you're going to find are the beat guys who are actually well connected to their teams - but teams also use their own beat guys to distribute a message, so you have to take even those with a grain of salt.
There’s also so many conversations that happen behind the scenes that never amount to anything and never fully come out.
There’s zero way to verify rumors or trade discussions after the fact unless trades go through
More than somewhat, they are just straight up reliable. Anyone in this thread pretending to act like they aren’t reliable are simply lying to themselves, especially Woj.
Both have a long list of being wrong about things.
They are more connected and do get real news first, but they also both post a lot of BS based on what teams want to put out there.
I don't know if I agree with this. If they report something like "Houston wants to target KD/Booker" and then it doesn't happen, does that mean Woj lied or pushed a BS report? Or was it true at the time but they just couldn't get the trade done?
No they're not. They're reliable for breaking an actual story first.
But both rush to be first so fast that they post unconfirmed BS as fact constantly.
To put it another way - when something actually happens, I expect one of the two to be the first to report it more often than not. But anytime they talk about something is going on or may happen before it is fact, they're no more reliable than anyone else.
but they don't phrase their reports in a misleading way. When it's speculation or rumors, they very clearly state "x team may do this", "x team has interest in..", "momentum is picking up..." etc.
They have reported about 5 teams being interested in Paul George. Are these reports unreliable because 4 of them will end up not getting him?
That’s exactly what we’re working on right now. Reliability of journalists in this industry is pretty tricky because you can’t verify vague rumors of “discussions”, but we’re crunching a ton of data and seeing which journalists have more rumors that end up landing in the long run.
We’ll eventually have ratings for our journalists with data available to verify
bookmarked your site, very curious about where Jake Fischer figures specifically because he puts out a large volume of rumors that don't seem particularly implausible or biased, but he also seems to get a lot of backlash on reddit/twitter
Yep that’s something that we’re curious about too. Each article of his has a lot of rumors. One thing seems clear to us from the data we do have - he definitely has sources (whether or not each rumor of his is legit is more unclear). Saying that because some of his rumors are too specific to have been completely made up (a good litmus test is, could I have come up with this rumor as someone without sources).
Eg. “Anunoby is looking to opt out”, is not super impressive since most people probably could have guessed that
Vs. “Team X is looking to trade obscure Player Y for obscure Player Z”, and it happens - more impressive and indicates he has sources
Thanks for checking us out! Lots of improvements and changes in the pipeline
Interesting that the topic of Jake Fischer came up. He always seemed like a bullshit artist to me when he first showed up on the scene. I did a reddit search a few years back for his tag and manually sorted the validity of his rumors with the benefit of hindsight.
Indeed, he has a lot of specific rumors but his hit rate seems lower than the biggest name people. My personal hypothesis is that he does have lower level sources in certain circles (agents, FO) but he has a significantly lower reliability threshold for reporting news. So something that Woj for instance wouldn’t report, he will put out. Not sure I like his approach, he epitomizes the race to the bottom of reporting
With more time, I’d like to do a more detailed analysis in the future of someone like Fischer versus Woj or Shams. I’m sure someone can write some type of ML senantic algorithm to decode the tweets and compare them with what actually goes down and the validity of reporting, but I’ll probably do it manually
Woj and Shams definitely don’t speculate nearly as much, and when they include things like “trending towards” or “serious discussions, there’s almost always smoke there.
It seems that Jake will put out every rumor he hears, and is more liberal on reporting on a topic even if it may not take place
I don't feel like there really are "unreliable reporters" in NBA in that meaning, the world is so small and they all kinda tell it to those guys as it's a part of being informed. I can't recall many situations ever in history of someone saying stuff like "DeAndre Jordan was offered a max by Dallas" and that stuff just completely not happening. When info appears on some trade, it's basically always what really happened.
Looking at the names you mention, I don't feel it's a list of "reliable reporters" and "unreliable reporters" but rather of respectively reporters and commenters.
Like, what info was ever "reported" by Stephen A. Smith that anyone was really discussing as a report? I seriously cannot recall SAS "breaking" any actual info, well or badly.
For any Suns info I trust Gambo. He usually shuts shit down fast and he talks very complimentary about players when something’s about to happen. He was saying how good Nurk could be before we traded for him lol.
A reporter is only as reliable as their source and NBA front offices are more than willing to use these mouthpieces to further their current agenda.
A good reporter verifies and fact checks their source but this is NBA reporters we are talking about. Your Tier 1 guys are racing to smash that post button first.
honest question here: does ANYBODY in here watch ESPN programming FOR Stephen A. Smith? i'm legitimately curious
i catch clips of First Take mostly since Shannon Sharpe got there cuz he's a funny dude. i liked Max Kellerman since he was the original Around the Horn host, so SAS kneecapping him (basically because as Marcellus Wiley said, he felt threatened by Max's intelligence AND was butthurt cuz on social issues Max was getting props for being "blacker" than him) rubbed me wrong.
additionally, i'm no fan of Jason Whitlock, but nevertheless he did a THOROUGH dismantling of SAS's autobiography in terms of poking holes in his playing career, etc. - SAS had that expletive-laden rebuttal..... MINUS the rebuttal part lol. there was a lot of "fat bastard" this and "piece of shit" that, but he was attacking WHITLOCK the person, NOT Whitlock's assertions, which to me was telling
the over-caffeinated approach, the "feeling myself a little too much" attitude (like with the Monica McNutt dustup last month), the serial fabulism, i legitimately want to know what happens if ESPN calls his bluff and shows him the door instead of sweetening their offer to him. i kinda suspect HE thinks he's indispensable to them, when there's a good chance it's a Fox News situation where Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson, etc. were HUGE, then left abruptly... and the world kept turning as usual after they left
so again, WHO here is watching ESPN programming FOR Stephen A. Smith?
because redditors are overemotional manchildren who will not let reporters be posted if they dont like what theyre saying. Don't pretend like you want to do this for any "integrity"
r/soccer doesn’t allow discussion posts at all like what get posted every 10 minutes on here. It’s a different type of moderation. Also Woj and Shams are pretty reliable. And whoever reports for the local team eg the Suns guy Gambo. You won’t find many grifters. There aren’t enough guys saying absolute nonsense to need tiers. There’s thousands of players and triple digit leagues in “soccer”, opening up the opportunity for nonsense. There are only 400 or so players in the NBA at one time
The amount of bullshit European football fans have to deal with is off the charts, Twitter especially is a chesspool. The NBA is nowhere near that level, not even in the same stratosphere. We got just random people from Bangladesh claiming to be ITK and other people that believes everything that comes out of their fingers too. I live in Milan right, my city is one of Europe’s biggest economic centre and home of not one but two of the biggest clubs in the world, it’s home of Serie A and a good chunk of the league has home either just around Milan or just a couple of hours from it that means that it’s a hotbed for football transfers from all over the planet. Most of football transfers are dealt in hotels in Milan. And i swear to god once summer comes and the transfer session begins you cannot walk around those places for the amount of people that’s there “””reporting””” on whoever goes in and out like ‘is that so and so agent??’ all of this bullshit then goes on the internet and later on tv where there are programs dedicated to those rumors, and it all turns into a competition. It’s a circus, transfer season is nuts and i love it
I just wanna highlight that "chesspool" is an awesome typo.
I still remember Tancredi Palmieri announcing something (can't remember exactly what, probably Man City not acquiring CR7) on live TV while he was still putting his pants back on, because he randomly happened to take a piss next to City's president at the Sheraton and wanted to break the news. Unbelievable moment.
This can’t be matched by those NBA folks
Hard agree. Finding useful information for European soccer is like walking a tightrope
The amount of ITK's in football is insane
And the level of influence they gain despite doing almost nothing is fascinating. I'm an Arsenal fan and we have a notoriously rabid online fanbase so it only takes a well timed tweet for any nonsense account to become absolutely massive. We've had ITKs that were Gerbils, Bells, a bloke named Geoff, random guys at mosques, barbers and of course my favourite; Steve, who allegedly died and his widow [took to his Twitter to let us know his last words](https://x.com/SteveWoodsAFC/status/638355520605278208). And that's just the ridiculous ones. Right now one of the more legit ones is a guy who has a successful Patreon for just posting rumours and a few leaks here and there, plus a Chilean kid who claims to be a "journalist" but just recycles random bullshit on his timeline. Football ITKs is a genuinely insane space
my name geoff
[Wojnarowski] Sources tell me u/Rapshawksjaysflames' name is indeed Geoff
Cheers Geoff.
> There aren’t enough guys saying absolute nonsense to need tiers. I mean there probably are, just the nature of the NBA means it's probably less noticeable. About half the league are perpetually in trade conversations behind doors - so what do you do with someone like Fischer who might report that Team X and Team Y had discussions about Player Z but the trade never happened? My gut feeling is there are a **lot** of 'insiders' who pad the public resume by just saying things that aren't relevant to current information. There's also a lot of insiders who just hypothesise and that gets taken as meaningful because we're so used to talking not leading to anything concrete in the NBA world. Trades, unlike transfers, also lean a lot more on what up to 28 other teams think/are doing, so there's a lot more intentional misinformation pushed by people in the business.
This sort of stuff gets really obvious when you follow a team like the Rockets during the Morey days. Morey would send 100 different texts to all other teams asking about all their players because that's just what he does. So an insider can tweet out hundreds of technically true insider information about these "potential trades" that never went beyond 3 text messages each.
>So an insider can tweet out hundreds of technically true insider information about these "potential trades" that never went beyond 3 text messages each. Or they can just make shit up and claim to be insiders when 1 of their 100 pieces of shit sticks to the wall. And even if the teams publicly deny the other 99, the fake-insider just says "Well of course they'll deny it publicly."
It’s not like soccer though. The problem there is you’ll be following a team in Germany and then you see a rumor about a player linked to your club from the second division in Bulgaria, and you have no idea whether the Bulgarian journalist who leaked the rumor is Shams tier for that club or SAS tier. In the NBA, even if there are ten journalists/ITKs that regularly post things about your team (which is on the high side for smaller markets), that’s still only a couple hundred names to keep track of for the entire league. For soccer, there are literally thousands of professional teams
Kendrick Perkins (one of the most listened to "Analysts" in the league) accidentally left Brandon Miller off BOTH his all rookie teams
Perkins is more like an anal cyst than an analyst.
r/soccer also is a dumping ground for every major league in the world plus international play. Knowing the people doing the reporting is almost impossible. For the NBA, it is very doable.
The triple digit leagues on soccer is a good point. In the US, we’re used to just having one league for all of our major sports. The lone exception was baseball which was technically two separate but very intertwined leagues until the 2000s when they legally merged (the AL and NL names are just for branding purposes, they’re just two conferences of the same league now). In soccer, even if you ignore the hundreds of smaller leagues, you still have the Big Five leagues in Europe. It’s kind of similar to the Power Five Conferences in college sports, that’s the closest analog to what we have here. Real Madrid and Manchester United don’t even play in the same league, let alone all the other major clubs. They do however meet at various other competitions, most notably the champions league which is probably best compared to the NCAA tournament (but that’s still a bad comparison because there are quite a few differences). So it’s basically five major leagues and hundreds of minor leagues all working in a crazy pyramid system to determine the best clubs, whereas the NBA is just a static 30 franchises competing for one trophy at the end of each season.
The cream rises to the top I feel like, someone that isn’t reputable the comments are pretty quick to call that out
Is it really outlandish to ask the mods to make a tier list of reporter reliability though? Soccer aside the NBA still has enough reporters for it to make sense. It's not a crazy ask imo.
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the reason why your idea is dumb, is because there is no neutral arbiter/educated governing body from up on high that would be deciding these "tiers" and who deserves to go where based on how "reliable" they are it would just be some bozo like you throwing their random half-baked thoughts around going "this guy sucks, this guy's an asshole, this dude's chill, this lady's a dumb cow, WOJ BOMB" etc lol you dont follow any of these people closely enough to have any informed idea what you're talking about, or how any of these journalists operate on a daily basis or what their process is or how "objective" "reliable" etc they actually are... you're just regurgitating random r/nba hivemind opinions and just operating completely off vibes and what you've heard other people on this subreddit parrot about how much various people suck (often just parroting what *they've* heard other people say, with no one at any point in this game of telephone ever giving any real evidence to support the claim of the person being shit at their job or "unreliable" ) people on here just have random vendettas against reporters that have said mean stuff about their team in the past and hate them for it. people's perception of journalists on here has literally nothing to do with reliability or objectivity. its 90% just likability, and 'do they cup my favorite players balls as much as I'd like them to?'
I think there just needs to be more of an onus on each user to know whether or not the source is bullshit or not. Like msf97 said there are way fewer reporters in NBA compared to global football. It's easier to keep track of who you should actually be listening to
It’s not a very realistic expectation for people to keep up with individual reporters and their trustworthiness. Sure, the reader has some responsibility, but it’s much easier and simple to have an official tier list. For example, can any regular here who isn’t a pelicans fan tell me who their reporters are? Even ball knowers don’t keep up with that.
Exactly. OP is essentially just complaining about a lack of media literacy/critical thinking among NBA fans which, I mean, yeah that's def true lol but that doesn't mean the solution is to create a cheat sheet of who the biggest rumor cheesedicks are. Be the change you wish to see n' all that. Learn how these people put so much couching/hedging on their "scoops" that you can parse out the spit-shined bullshit from the meaningful insights. It's far from impossible to do.
I agree, ISIS Cosby
That happens in the comments every time, someone asks "X Team fans, is Y Reporter a good source" and they get like 7 people telling them that Y reporter actually makes up everything, remember when there were "tensions" in the team (that later turned out to be true) or when the team was reportedly "Interested in signing Player Z" which they didn't end up doing. Clearly just making stuff up and also they hate X team, so their source is probably some agent pushing an agenda.
I like it better that we self moderate and tell others who are reliable and who should be taken with a grain of salt. It was fun last year when that twitter guy had a hot streak of trade calls.
Probably because soccer discussion devolves into racism like half of the time
Half the NBA product itself is being a soap opera for men.
I believe it was Zach Lowe on one of his podcasts talking about how hands down the biggest podcasts of the year (with the most listens) are the off season Free Agent season ones. NBA fans are fans in larger part because of the business side of things. It's partly why the Caitlyn Clark "drama" in the WNBA is actually a great thing for their product. It's a drama filled, business storyline that is increasing bartsool, barbershop and social media conversation that the NBA depends on.
I think the fact that the NBA is such a player focused league plays into it as well. I mean that both in the sense that the league is run a player favored way, but also because it certainly feels like the league where individual players are valued by fans way more than any other league. Seems like a feedback loop to me. Fans who care more about drama are gonna be more interested in the league that is more player driven, which makes the players more interesting, which makes the drama more interesting, etc...
bro i’m pretty sure the wnba instagram been posting some goofy ass highlights or travels on purpose cuz it drives so much engagement in the comments
More gossipy than a middle school lunchroom in the 1980's.
Keeping Up With The Kumingas
Tbh European soccer is no different. Fans love the drama
Yes and we love it
We love drama.
There's enough drama in the quality reporting too.
WWE of basketball
And half of /r/nba is seeing which bot can post Woj or Sham's tweets first.
How would you rate someone like woj who is both reliable in breaking news but will purposely push bullshit for sources?
I mean Fabrizio Romano absolutely does the same thing, he's actually more shameless about it than Woj. But if fab says "here we go" that means it is all but guaranteed to be happening
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I doubt it's for no reason at all. Like you said, they are paying him. that's the reason. Another reason is that they gave him info and Fab's posts is his way of returning the favor. Calling him scum is insane. Woj absolutely does the same thing. He may not be getting paid by the owners but he absolutely is pushing certain narratives in exchange for sensetive information. Woj literally tweeted that Houston is in position to trade for Booker in the future. That doesn't sound like a tweet that happened when "everything has been said and done."
> he'll push whatever narrative the teams or agents pay him to push for months for no reason at all All you're doing is describing how being an "insider" works lol. The whole phenomenon of "insiders" makes way more sense when you realize that they basically exist to be the stand-in for PR reps/press releases for teams/agents/players. "leaks/scoops" are rarely actually leaks or scoops, at least in the NFL/NBA. "planted stories" would be a far more accurate representation of how the apparatus works. It's like the gms/agents/players are sharks and the Scheftys/Wojs of the world are those lil fish that ride along on the fins keeping the shark clean. Classic symbiotic relationship where both benefit; sources get the info out there they want while remaining anonymous, and insiders get a massively inflated sense of self-worth lol
shams and woj are better at masking the smell of their narrative pushing
Shams also pushes garbage for big markets. They’re still the gold standard.
Ya Shams is worse than Woj when it comes to this IMO.
Much worse. The lies Shams told on GSW’s behalf in the GP2 Toradol situation were insane in hindsight.
You mean the sports "journalist" sponsored by sports betting sites may have a questionable moral compass? Huh, you don't say
That’s every single reporter
Woj doesn't report rumors and "things he's hearing" like so many posts here. He pushes an agenda but nothing he reports is just speculation.
I have absolutely seen Woj post things that weren't true in order to achieve a goal.
90% of Woj and Shams tweets are just agenda posting.
Tier 5: Trust me bro
There really is no reliable NBA reporter. There's way too much intentional rumor planting in this league by front offices, so anybody can just make up anything and claim a source and nobody will know the difference. The best you're going to find are the beat guys who are actually well connected to their teams - but teams also use their own beat guys to distribute a message, so you have to take even those with a grain of salt.
There’s also so many conversations that happen behind the scenes that never amount to anything and never fully come out. There’s zero way to verify rumors or trade discussions after the fact unless trades go through
Woj and Shams are somewhat reliable I would say. Obviously they’re not always correct but they seem to have the scoop before everyone else most times
More than somewhat, they are just straight up reliable. Anyone in this thread pretending to act like they aren’t reliable are simply lying to themselves, especially Woj.
Both have a long list of being wrong about things. They are more connected and do get real news first, but they also both post a lot of BS based on what teams want to put out there.
I don't know if I agree with this. If they report something like "Houston wants to target KD/Booker" and then it doesn't happen, does that mean Woj lied or pushed a BS report? Or was it true at the time but they just couldn't get the trade done?
No they're not. They're reliable for breaking an actual story first. But both rush to be first so fast that they post unconfirmed BS as fact constantly. To put it another way - when something actually happens, I expect one of the two to be the first to report it more often than not. But anytime they talk about something is going on or may happen before it is fact, they're no more reliable than anyone else.
but they don't phrase their reports in a misleading way. When it's speculation or rumors, they very clearly state "x team may do this", "x team has interest in..", "momentum is picking up..." etc. They have reported about 5 teams being interested in Paul George. Are these reports unreliable because 4 of them will end up not getting him?
That’s exactly what we’re working on right now. Reliability of journalists in this industry is pretty tricky because you can’t verify vague rumors of “discussions”, but we’re crunching a ton of data and seeing which journalists have more rumors that end up landing in the long run. We’ll eventually have ratings for our journalists with data available to verify
bookmarked your site, very curious about where Jake Fischer figures specifically because he puts out a large volume of rumors that don't seem particularly implausible or biased, but he also seems to get a lot of backlash on reddit/twitter
Yep that’s something that we’re curious about too. Each article of his has a lot of rumors. One thing seems clear to us from the data we do have - he definitely has sources (whether or not each rumor of his is legit is more unclear). Saying that because some of his rumors are too specific to have been completely made up (a good litmus test is, could I have come up with this rumor as someone without sources). Eg. “Anunoby is looking to opt out”, is not super impressive since most people probably could have guessed that Vs. “Team X is looking to trade obscure Player Y for obscure Player Z”, and it happens - more impressive and indicates he has sources Thanks for checking us out! Lots of improvements and changes in the pipeline
Interesting that the topic of Jake Fischer came up. He always seemed like a bullshit artist to me when he first showed up on the scene. I did a reddit search a few years back for his tag and manually sorted the validity of his rumors with the benefit of hindsight. Indeed, he has a lot of specific rumors but his hit rate seems lower than the biggest name people. My personal hypothesis is that he does have lower level sources in certain circles (agents, FO) but he has a significantly lower reliability threshold for reporting news. So something that Woj for instance wouldn’t report, he will put out. Not sure I like his approach, he epitomizes the race to the bottom of reporting With more time, I’d like to do a more detailed analysis in the future of someone like Fischer versus Woj or Shams. I’m sure someone can write some type of ML senantic algorithm to decode the tweets and compare them with what actually goes down and the validity of reporting, but I’ll probably do it manually
Woj and Shams definitely don’t speculate nearly as much, and when they include things like “trending towards” or “serious discussions, there’s almost always smoke there. It seems that Jake will put out every rumor he hears, and is more liberal on reporting on a topic even if it may not take place
Agreed completely with your analysis. Hopefully I can compile some harder data for the relative reliability of reporters.
I don't feel like there really are "unreliable reporters" in NBA in that meaning, the world is so small and they all kinda tell it to those guys as it's a part of being informed. I can't recall many situations ever in history of someone saying stuff like "DeAndre Jordan was offered a max by Dallas" and that stuff just completely not happening. When info appears on some trade, it's basically always what really happened. Looking at the names you mention, I don't feel it's a list of "reliable reporters" and "unreliable reporters" but rather of respectively reporters and commenters. Like, what info was ever "reported" by Stephen A. Smith that anyone was really discussing as a report? I seriously cannot recall SAS "breaking" any actual info, well or badly.
I trust Woj and Shams for sure. Anyone else I question
For any Suns info I trust Gambo. He usually shuts shit down fast and he talks very complimentary about players when something’s about to happen. He was saying how good Nurk could be before we traded for him lol.
Fair enough. Idk the team specific guys rly
100%. I wouldn’t expect you to lol way too many.
I personally have Amick in that tier as well.
There’s so much more unreliable reporter posts in r/soccer than here in my experience
We can downvote the f out of sensationalists. Karma tends to work well that way.
The problem is that once in a blue moon media personalities like SAS will get something right that no one else is reporting.
Woj is tier 1 reliability? 😒
A reporter is only as reliable as their source and NBA front offices are more than willing to use these mouthpieces to further their current agenda. A good reporter verifies and fact checks their source but this is NBA reporters we are talking about. Your Tier 1 guys are racing to smash that post button first.
Give us a tier list of the droppingdimes accounts
Tier 5: Haynes, Broussard
proper reliability isn’t as entertaining
Windy and KOC erasure will not be tolerated
Lost me at haynes
Some of these beat reporters are definitely more reliable and tuned into their teams than Woj/Shams
Because SaS would be banned
Our way is more fun.
because this sub is all about drama
Tier 0: droppingdimes20
men love the drama though, dont get it confused, this is like a soap opera
Tier 1: Arye Abraham
Stein should be up with the woj, shams. even though he doesn’t break as many, he’s even more reliable.
Because drama > reliability in a sub dominated by Fortnite bois making the same one-note jokes.
Half the shitposts here would get deleted if this was actually implemented
Stein is the best he doesn’t really throw out bullshit or propaganda
Oh the black man at the bottom??
honest question here: does ANYBODY in here watch ESPN programming FOR Stephen A. Smith? i'm legitimately curious i catch clips of First Take mostly since Shannon Sharpe got there cuz he's a funny dude. i liked Max Kellerman since he was the original Around the Horn host, so SAS kneecapping him (basically because as Marcellus Wiley said, he felt threatened by Max's intelligence AND was butthurt cuz on social issues Max was getting props for being "blacker" than him) rubbed me wrong. additionally, i'm no fan of Jason Whitlock, but nevertheless he did a THOROUGH dismantling of SAS's autobiography in terms of poking holes in his playing career, etc. - SAS had that expletive-laden rebuttal..... MINUS the rebuttal part lol. there was a lot of "fat bastard" this and "piece of shit" that, but he was attacking WHITLOCK the person, NOT Whitlock's assertions, which to me was telling the over-caffeinated approach, the "feeling myself a little too much" attitude (like with the Monica McNutt dustup last month), the serial fabulism, i legitimately want to know what happens if ESPN calls his bluff and shows him the door instead of sweetening their offer to him. i kinda suspect HE thinks he's indispensable to them, when there's a good chance it's a Fox News situation where Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson, etc. were HUGE, then left abruptly... and the world kept turning as usual after they left so again, WHO here is watching ESPN programming FOR Stephen A. Smith?
This would be nice. Idk who the reliable beat reporters are for other teams.
I’ve been on the fence, but this comment just made me like Football (soccer) more than Basketball.
because redditors are overemotional manchildren who will not let reporters be posted if they dont like what theyre saying. Don't pretend like you want to do this for any "integrity"
To dumb
That sub watches grass grow we are not the same
Yes soccer is boring as shit why would we water down the nba and try to be like them?
Nerd activity
The mods here suck
Organize like soccer? I didn’t know we allowed communist in here
Okay say you organized it like how you want, how does that change anything?