Adrian Wojnarowski vs. Shams Charania Is the Most Intense Rivalry in the NBA—and Its Emptiest

NBA free agency is here! Big players, little players, foreign players, training camp invite guys, all of them on the grind, going places, shifting fates, acquiring future money that will turn them into untradeable albatrosses someday. A bonanza—an orgy—of information, gossip, conjecture, speculation. The only time of year when you, a normally rational person, can see a tweet like this…

…and proceed to speculate wildly about what this means for the Celtics: if The Rooster will be what they need to “take them over the top”; if this is somehow a signal that the Celtics are shoring up wing depth because they are planning on shipping Tatum off to the Wizards; or even wonder aloud if it feels right for an Italian basketball legend to sign with the Celtics, the NBA team most aligned with the Irish. If you’re sports-minded, it’s this or investing emotionally in the outcome of the NL East. The choice is clear.

If you’re looking for the hottest scoops, there’s only two men in town: ESPN NBA Insider Adrian Wojnarowski and his protégé, The Athletic’s NBA reporting ace Shams Charania. These guys are the NBA insiders extraordinaire. Just check the feeds!

Woo mama! Gorge yourself on that delicious information! Sure, maybe these scoops amount to “small potatoes,” but if you want to know where Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving are going to end up when the league tips off, or the results of the Lakers’ ongoing roster hell, and you want to know it early and fast, for some reason, Woj and Shams are the biggest game in town. The sheer thrill of reading about a transaction that will eventually be reported by a team’s PR department is the reason that a small portion of online sports fandom has become weirdly obsessed with these dudes—tracking charts to see who is out there getting the most scoops, memes half-ironically turning scoop acquisition into sport, not to mention the bevy of Jeff Tiedrichs out there, replying to duplicated scoops with “late,” the lowest form of media criticism humanly possible:

This crap trends. Do I believe that anyone invested in the scoop-pissing matches of a couple of sports reporters should take stock of their lives and do something else? Yes. Video games are fun, for instance. But trending is trending, and so the guys who can be scoopmasters are compensated in kind and regarded as prestige hires for organizations who routinely produce more enlightening and interesting work just by rolling out of bed.

Lost in all this hooting and hollering is the question of how Woj, Shams, and their ilk actually became “insiders,” and whether or not what they do has any real value. These dribs of tweet-sized information aren’t really privileged in any way. These aren’t secrets—stuff people wouldn’t know without them. The only people whose material existence is affected by the early release of player signings are NBA gamblers and casinos who are trying to beat each other to bet on or adjust lines before the other notices. All these signings will be announced sooner or later by teams or agents or players themselves on one of the many easily accessible social media conduits they can access on their phones.

What made Woj the Scoopmaster has very little to do with “reporting” as you may think of it. Woj’s skills lie mostly in relationship maintenance and favor trading. He isn’t a “journalist” so much as an information broker, sitting on a silo of little secrets and grievances, unleashing them when someone needs him to, and using that position to leak little bits of information for a parade of general managers, owners, agents, players, and assistant coaches, and taking the little kernels of information they have immediate access to as payment.

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Take, for instance, the saga of general manager Neil Olshey’s outster in Portland. In 2021, the Trail Blazers opened an investigation into Olshey’s workplace culture, which they concluded was “pretty bad.” So, they voided his contract and fired him with cause. Now, it’s maybe worth saying here that there were a significant number of people, myself included, that figured this had less to do with any sort of toxic environment Olshey fostered and more to do with the fact that he was pretty bad at his job, especially regarding his hiring of coach Chauncey Billups and his dunderheaded efforts to keep the media from inquiring about Billups’ being accused of sexual assult in 1997, and serving as the object of star point guard Damian Lillard’s ire.

Either way you regard Olshey’s dismissal, I don’t know a single Blazer fan who thought he was the engine of the Blazers’ success. If anything, Lillard seemed like he was dragging the team to success in spite of Neil’s terrible organizational skills, bizarre taste in players, and nearly decade-long obsession with pairing Lillard with another undersized ball-handling guard who wasn’t a particularly good defender. No tears were shed for Neil.

And yet, one man disagreed with the prevailing sentiment about Olshey, a general manager who, in 2021, was employing a single scout to cover the entirety of European basketball:

It does not take a rocket scientist to conclude why Woj was defying conventional wisdom to stick up for a poor GM who got fired because he had no manners. It’s because Olshey was a source, and this kind of thing is the currency that a broker pays for information. It’s not even the most flagrant compliment he posted on Olshey’s behalf:

I watched that team religiously. It was one of the most irritating collections of people I’ve ever subjected myself to.

Woj kept at it on Olshey’s behalf. He wrote a story that portrayed Lillard, not a big Olshey fan, somewhat unflatteringly, and the Blazers as an unmoored organization with a messy ownership structure that would have trouble attracting a top flight GM. That second thing is truer than I want it to be, certainly, but also not the kind of thing that a straight NBA reporter would normally write unless he was doing a favor for someone with an ax to grind. Lillard, not a Woj source by any stretch of the imagination (he works with Chris Haynes, who started his career in Portland), was not happy with this, and even posted about it:

Woj wasn’t done. He appeared on ESPN sort-of representing the league’s GMs, who were concerned that Olshey’s getting fired for cause might set a precedent that threatened their contracts in the near-term:

Woj isn’t new to this. Before he was the Insider at the Worldwide Leader, he was dishing at Yahoo! Sports and subject to fewer restrictions around mixing his reporting with opinion. Woj would write these wacky, dishy columns where he would exalt or disparage some NBA player, semi-openly doing the dirty work of some player or agent who could pepper him with scoops later on. A column exalting Kobe Bryant’s competitive fire right after he used a homophobic slur against a referee. All-world weirdo Josh Smith is thriving in Houston with his old pal Dwight Howard (this did not last). Kevin Garnett, labor hero. Rudy Gay getting traded from Memphis is an act of a team that is destined for disaster, and also a sign that LeBron was wrong about superteams. (The Grizz got better without Gay; superteams continued apace.)

Most infamous during this time was Woj’s one-man war with LeBron James, a topic that could take up a whole graduate-level thesis. The combination of personal distaste and dagger-wielding sources that set Woj after LeBron was powerful enough to power a mid-sized city. It didn’t mean enough to James in 2010, when a stacked Celtics team was beating the piss out of his Cavs pirate ship squad. James going to Miami after a lackluster tenure in Cleveland was an occasion to print all kinds of wild nonsense about his playing second fiddle to Wade and being destined for a lifetime of destitution (Danny Ferry and Mike Brown, the Cavs’ hapless GM and coach, had nothing to do with anything, though), and leak some little things about how Coach K didn’t like him in 2008. The “Heat experiment” was “teetering on collapse” in 2012 (they won the title).

These wild columns all read as nonsense, but if you adjust for the fact that Kobe was a major Woj source, LeBron wasn’t, and various GMs and coaches and agents are well-served and sated by their animus getting blasted into the public sphere, well, Woj’s work as a columnist becomes a Nabokov novel—a labyrinth of outside interests forming a reality that operates for the purposes of the narrator.

Woj passed his gifts for the dark arts of interest-driven information-trading onto Shams Charania, a young Chicago native notable for being America’s leading writer of tortured, confusing prose. What Shams lacks in elegance he makes up for in grind.

Shams started hunting for NBA sources when he was still in high school, idolizing Woj and fashioning himself as a scoop machine before most kids have devoted themselves to something aside from feeling OK. He was a madman: pitching whoever’s email he could find, driving from Chicago to Milwaukee to use a media credential for a gig he wasn’t even being paid for, following Brandon Jennings into the parking lot after the game so he could grill him about free agency. In 2015, when he was just 21, he joined Yahoo! Sports and came under Woj’s wing. Iron sharpened iron, and when Woj left for ESPN in 2017, Shams became his primary competition in the marketplace of scoops, finding his way over to The Athletic—a sports media startup that is now owned by The New York Times, where he writes stuff people mostly don’t read and nets big retweet totals for minor transactional scoops. He also works with Stadium, an online sports concern owned by the monstrous GOP propaganda mill Sinclair Broadcast Group, where he does unremarkable video hits.

But his lack of flair is smothered by his insane devotion to scoops. A recent New York Post profile featured some of the bleakest anecdotes you can imagine: “Asked about his screen time, Charania answered that the typical amount is 17-18 hours per day—and that it climbs over 20 hours during frenetic periods of the NBA Draft and free agency. It makes his ‘heart sink’ when he is on a flight where the Wi-Fi doesn’t work. He mostly forgoes driving for ride-shares—his trips from the suburbs into Stadium’s offices adjoining the United Center are about 40 minutes each way, a couple times a week—lest he miss a scoop while behind the wheel.” He didn’t attend parties in college, he doesn’t date, he only plays basketball when he is pretty sure there will be no scoops. He has devoted himself, body and mind, to The Scoop. Love? Not a scoop. Joy? Not a scoop. Pleasure? Buddy, you know that’s not a scoop. Just day and night information-brokering, living life in pursuit of inconsequential information that will become publicly available in short order. It’s clout-seeking behavior, taken to extremes one can hardly imagine.

A reader who’s gotten to this point might ask: Who cares? Why exactly should I give a damn that the biggest scoopers in basketball are transparently operating as information brokers and producing very little of consequence?

The sports business has real problems, problems that might even effect people who don’t care about them. The gender gap in sports front offices would be unacceptable in any other industry. WNBA teams pay in peanuts, forcing players to seek contracts overseas, where they are susceptible to, for instance, getting thrown in prison right when their host country enters into a conflict with NATO. Teams run over municipalities to get stadiums built—a shoddy investment that enriches the private sector at the expense of other, far more useful spheres of society.

But the fact that everyone covering sports day-to-day is in the business of favor-trading means that they are apt to represent the perspectives and values of the industry they cover. When you’re a gear in the machine you aren’t looking in from the outside, you’re just keeping everything moving. These problems are uninteresting or untouchable to a perspective that is so soaked in sports itself, focused on transactions and stats and wins and losses and over/unders. RTs and clout and nice contracts don’t come from thinking and talking critically about the environment where this all happens—it comes from the scoop, the transaction, the asinine building blocks of the ticker at the MGM Sportsbook. Getting that involves submerging yourself in the day-to-day of the sport, giving whatever values or perspective you might bring as an observer over to the bickering and backstabbing of a small cadre of executives and agents.

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This is not uncommon across journalism. Accessing power means adopting its mindset, like Shams and Woj have adopted the mindset of the league’s movers and shakers. Covering startups and accepting the baseline premises of their culture might lead someone to, say, write uncritical profiles of blood-related grifters. All of your sources are implanted in the national security state? Well, I certainly hope they aren’t dead set on starting a war, because it’s possible they might tell you some untrue things. An approach to covering video games that is fixated on release dates and inside info is probably not going to be all that concerned with the widespread labor disasters in game studios all across the world. God forbid you need access to the inner thoughts of police and prosecutors, who lie constantly and have some very peculiar ideas about their place in society. Even if Woj and Shams have devoted themselves to thriving in a beat where these conflicts of interest amount to very little of genuine importance, their disease is the disease of the profession at large.

Stand in awe at its strange works and despair.

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