Joe Dumars Is a Fraud

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By Jeff Moss
DetroitSportsRag@GMail.com
December 17, 2014

This is really an ugly story but one that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has been a longtime reader of this website. It’s just more evidence of the lengths to which former Pistons President Joe Dumars went to ensure positive media coverage of his tenure as an executive in Detroit.

I HIGHLY recommend that you read this fantastic New Republic article by Kevin Draper which chronicles the writing style of Yahoo! NBA columnist Adrian Wojnarowski. Led by DSR contributor Brian Coburn, there has been a prevailing feeling on this website’s message boards that Wojnarowski’s columns have always been just a little too cute by half.

His prose has been just too perfect — in a Manti Te’o sort of fashion — with all of the espionage that you normally would find in an Ian Fleming novel and peppered with a massive amount of unnamed sources. I am not going to get into the entire epic takedown by Draper but I do want to bring attention to one section of this masterpiece that relates to Detroit sports.

Here is that long passage:

But to truly understand how Wojnarowski and his sources operate, there is no better place to look than his relationship with Joe Dumars, who worked as the Detroit Pistons president of basketball operations from 2000 to 2014.

Dumars was very successful for the first half of his executive career, assembling teams that won an NBA Championship and reached six consecutive Eastern Conference Finals. During his final six years in Detroit however—before he “stepped down” instead of being fired—the Pistons were one of the worst teams in the league, largely because of a series of disastrous decisions Dumars made. You would never know about it, though, if you read only Wojnarowski for your Pistons coverage.

With Detroit sliding down the standings, Wojnarowski broke nearly every significant—and insignificant—Pistons story for a half-decade: the Allen Iverson trade, the Amir Johnson trade, drafting Austin Daye, signing Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva, hiring John Kuester, trading Aaron Afflalo, signing Chris Wilcox, signing Ben Wallace, drafting Greg Monroe, signing Tracy McGrady, Rip Hamilton arguing with John Kuester, drafting Brandon Knight, hiring Lawrence Frank, re-signing Tayshuan Prince, re-signing Rodney Stuckey, trading Ben Gordon, signing Josh Smith, signing Chauncey Billups, signing Brandon Jennings, signing Josh Harrellson, and firing Mo Cheeks. While Wojnarowski was busy breaking news about the team, he wasn’t busy analyzing it: Between 2008 and 2012, Wojnarowski didn’t write a negative piece about Dumars or the Pistons, despite the fact that they had transformed from a perennial contender to an also-ran. Instead, Wojnarowski penned several sympathetic profiles of Dumars, including ones that covered his completion of his college degree and another wholly about his defensive skills as a player in the 1980s.

By 2012, Wojnarowski could no longer ignore how poorly Dumars was performing, so he wrote a piece on the Pistons’ rebuilding. It included heavy participation from Dumars and unearned optimism like “Slowly, surely, Dumars is regenerating the Pistons again.” In each of the two seasons after the piece ran, the Pistons went 29–53 and missed qualifying for the playoffs by nine games. It also emphasized Dumars’ strong relationship with coach Lawrence Frank, “who has returned accountability to the locker room.” Dumars would fire Frank six months later.

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.

Wow!!!!!!!!

Look, this site’s bullshit detector went off every single time that Wojnarowski penned another flattering piece on  Dumars, especially when it became clear that Joe D. had crippled his team with awful management.

Dumars should have been fired the moment Tom Gores took the reigns but it was Joe D.’s reputation in the league that kept him employed with a neophyte owner — a reputation mainly built by Adrian Wojnarowski.

The most insulting fellatio job was the 2012 column in which “Woj” tried to make the case that Dumars’ was successfully retooling the franchise.  He actually had the audacity to write this about the man who gave us Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva:

All these years later, the Pistons are slowly, surely rising again, and it’s still on Dumars’ watch. He once constructed a champion here in a most historic way, and out of the darkness, out of a spectacular struggle, the elements of a contender are surfacing again.

And then when it became clear that Gores was going to finally make a change and get rid of Dumars, Wojnarowski wrote several times that Dumars would have no problem finding a new gig in the NBA. We’re waiting ……

We joked on the site that Wojnarowski must have been getting paid by Dumars to act as his agent. That’s how outrageous this relationship looked to any casual Pistons fan. Fuck, Scott Boras and Jon Heyman look like the Montagues and the Capulets in comparison.

And now we finally know what the quid-pro-quo relationship between the two was built around. Dumars would feed Wojnarowski confidential league memos in exchange for flowery columns sure to either keep the heat off Dumars or to assist him in getting another job.

I mean, the guy was fined $500,000 by the NBA for providing a REPORTER secret league information. And that only occurred AFTER David Stern’s people had to run an ABSCAM-esque operation to entrap Joe in the first place.

Think about that for a second. The NBA had to run a STING OPERATION that included falsifying documents in order to catch a “rat” who was leaking privileged information.

And that MOLE ended up being the dude the league named their SPORTSMANSHIP AWARD after. Like, remember when Lady Byng was caught handing over secret information to Foster Hewitt? Neither do I.

What a farce the NBA has become. How did they not change the name of the Joe Dumars Sportsmanship Award immediately after this incident? And why are we only learning about it now?

But this has been Dumars’ M.O. for years. He once gave Rob Parker a $5,000 “loan” back when Parker was covering the Pistons for the Detroit News as a columnist; the acid tongued Parker NEVER said a bad word about the Pistons GM.

While Parker would rip EVERYONE in town — even going as far as to mock Rod Marinelli’s daughter for not marrying a better defensive coordinator — he defended Dumars until the bitter end, not even levying the slightest criticism over the Darko Debacle.

We know for a fact that he had Wojnarowski and Parker in his back pocket; one can only imagine why beat writers Vince Ellis and Vince Goodwill have always had the former shooting guard’s back as well.

Goodwill’s imbecilic coverage of Dumars’ disastrous end of his tenure was so laughable that we nicknamed him GoodSHILL. Hell, there is now a Goodshill parody account on Twitter that has more followers than the account of the team’s radio pre- and postgame host. But what we found out AFTER Dumars was axed as GM is that Goodwill’s loyalty wasn’t to the Pistons but to JOE DUMARS ONLY.

How else can you explain this insane Tweet from just a couple of weeks ago?

Ummmm, what? Dumars isn’t here? Stop blaming him?!??!?! That would be like blaming Barack Obama for the country’s problems on February 15, 2009.

Yep, George W. Bush isn’t here. Stop blaming him. Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?

Dumars flew this team into the proverbial mountain over the last six years with mistake after mistake and Stan Van Gundy was supposed to wave a magic wand (no Ron Jeremy jokes) and turn this team into a winner overnight?

Parker took five large. Wojnarowski traded glowing reports for secret memos. One can only imagine what Goodshill’s motivation is in writing shit like that.

What a sad end to such a great legacy. And maybe thanks to Wojnarowski’s Jedi Mind Trick articles, you have to wonder how much further behind the eight-ball this pathetic franchise is in getting back to respectability.