Mario Hezonja Will Join The Knicks After A Misfired Woj Bomb About Portland

With all apologies to Mario Hezonja joining the New York Knicks is not the biggest news of the day when LeBron James finally announces that he’s joining the New York Knicks.

Sure, Hezoja has been an entirely serviceable small forward for the Orlando Magic for the last three seasons, but where he lands is not on the radar for most NBA fans, especially when LeBron finally says he’s going to be a Los Angeles Laker. And yet, Hezonja’s signing became a big deal on Sunday night when ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski mistakenly reported that he had signed with the Portland Trail Blazers.

The problem is, of course, Hezonja was not going to sign with Portland. He signed with the New York Knicks.

To be fair to Wojnarowski, the pressure’s on him, especially when former protégé at Yahoo, Shams Charania is now a rival in the breaking basketball news business. In a world where people have every Wojnarowski tweet pushed to their phone, the news was quickly spread by thousands upon thousands of people in an instant. And so Woj simply corrected himself and moved on to tweet about the transaction, putting KNICKS in all-caps in his subsequent tweets.

And to be clear, no one was upset at Wojnarowski for the mistake. In fact, the reaction to it was entirely due to the fact that everything Wojnarowski reports is bulletproof. Wojnarowski quickly corrected himself after a bit of confusion about why Portland would even want Hezonja, drawing a bit of laughter and mostly a lot of clarity to NBA fans still buzzing about James finally picking a new home.

Hezonja, to his credit, did make it official that he’s joining the Knicks and even made a joke at his own expense. And Woj returned the favor in kind.

Good for Woj to take a slight L with some grace in a world where so few people, sports reporters in particular, struggle to admit they got it wrong. In the words of Lianne La Havas, we all make mistakes.