In June 2011, basketball fans who wanted to watch the NBA Draft did what they had done for years: They flipped on ESPN. The sports network had aired the event since 2003, and the 2011 version started like all the others, with then-NBA Commissioner David Stern announcing the first pick in his nasally New York accent: “The Cleveland Cavaliers select Kyrie Irving, from Duke University.”

But then a strange thing happened. At 7:43 p.m., Yahoo Sports NBA columnist Adrian Wojnarowski tweeted: “The Timberwolves have already alerted Derrick Williams' camp: They're drafting him with the No. 2 pick.” Two minutes later Stern walked out to the stage and repeated the same thing. At 7:56 p.m., Wojnarowski tweeted “The Cavs will draft Tristan Thompson with the fourth pick, a source says.” A minute later Stern made it official. Wojnarowski scooped half of the 30 first round picks, and his Yahoo Sports colleague Marc Spears racked up a few more.

At that time, Wojnarowski had 90,000 followers on Twitter. Today he has over 800,000. His owning of the 2011 draft “was the first time you saw the power of Twitter [in sports journalism],” says Sports Business Journal reporter John Ourand. Wojnarowski now breaks news on Twitter so frequently that his fans have quit lumping his messages in with the millions of other “tweets” sent every day. Instead, basketball fans refer to them as #WojBombs. They are so essential to the functioning of the NBA that some league executives have turned on text notifications just for Wojnarowski’s tweets.

“I signed a player, and my staff didn’t know that we got the guy yet, and I heard the cheering outside the office because they had seen Woj tweet it,” one team executive said. “I was still on the phone with the agent, negotiating areas of the exhibit, and Woj already had it.”

When Wojnarowski began at Yahoo Sports in 2006 the site wasn’t known for its sports reporting. Wojnarowski singlehandedly changed that. “He is the one who made Yahoo, it is not Yahoo that made him,” says ESPN’s Brian Windhorst. Wojnarowski churns out reported columns at a furious pace and often publishes them in the middle of the night. “He is a complete freaking animal,” says New York Daily News Knicks reporter Frank Isola. “Adrian is basically a reporter on steroids.”