The most prominent scoopster in basketball will take over the ESPN job recently vacated by his mentor and rival. Or, as he might put it: Sources say that the seat at ESPN, vacated by the sudden departure of Adrian Wojnarowski, has since been filled in inevitable fashion by the arrival of Shams Charania of The Athletic (2018–2024), who is ramping up toward a filled capacity of "Senior NBA Insider."
When Adrian Wojnarowski abruptly quit his job at ESPN in September, he left some fans contemplating the grim state of basketball media shaped almost singlehandedly by him, turning it into a ceaseless cycle of obscure transactional information. A few weeks ahead of the NBA regular season, Woj quit this hell of his own devising, springing instead for a general manager role for the men's basketball team at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure University. With his departure, it wasn't clear which path ESPN's coverage would take from there. When the company laid off the mainstream's sharpest and best-loved NBA analyst, Zach Lowe, there was something of an answer: What's coming next was bound to be a lot dumber. On Monday, Charania announced that he was joining ESPN as its "Senior NBA Insider," a job that paid its previous occupant approximately $7 million per year.
ESPN reportedly considered replacing Woj with an internal hire. Jeff Passan could have moved over from his MLB coverage. Adam Schefter could have taken on the NBA in addition to his NFL duties to become the "Ultimate Insider," a purely hypothetical job that would presumably shorten its occupant's life expectancy by a decade while contributing very little public understanding of either sport. Instead ESPN hired Charania, who spent the last six years working at The Athletic, competing with Wojnarowski for the same scraps of information. When asked for his reaction on Jim Rome's show this afternoon, Woj said, "I hope he has as fulfilling and as rewarding of a career as I had," which could be read as a malediction.
Charania, like Woj before him, maintains an astounding number of relationships across the league with an average 18 hours of phone usage. (An NBA team employee previously told Defector that Charania had once sent a "Happy Columbus Day" text.) Someone in that position has gathered a lot of interesting information about the NBA, but the bits that actually make it into his published work are generally pretty dull, servile, or impossible to parse. Charania's at his most entertaining when describing fights, so it's appropriate that his most recently published (and perhaps final) article at The Athletic is about Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve confronting Connecticut Sun players after Game 1 of their WNBA semifinal series. "[Reeve] 'ran up' on Sun players, as one source briefed on the incident described, and arena security needed to get involved to defuse the scene," wrote ESPN's newest insider, in a co-bylined piece with Ben Pickman.
Overall, Charania's tenure at The Athletic was characterized by lots and lots of tweets, along with astounding parentheticals, Sphinx-like riddles, credulous stenography of some of the stupidest ideas in the league, a sentence so demented we had to draw it, and a botched pre-draft report that altered gambling odds while he continued to collect checks from a gambling company. His departure puts an end to one of the great sight gags in sports journalism: seeing his sentences beneath a nytimes.com URL. Prayers are ramping up to his new editors at ESPN.
