How ESPN’s Shams Charania (BA ’17) became the NBA’s scoop king

Speculation swirled: Was Dončić’s early season injury a concern? Did he have a personality clash with coaches? Was the trade financially motivated? Billionaire investor Mark Cuban had just sold his majority stake in the franchise in November. Did the Mavericks’ new owners want out of Dončić’s five-year, $215 million contract set to expire in 2026?

Charania, who had started at ESPN just six months before the scoop, had his theories. But he had more immediate matters to attend to. Still five days to go until the NBA trade deadline on Feb. 6, Charania, the Chicago-born son of Pakistani immigrants, was at ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut, his eyes glued to his mobile. In and outside the studio, he spends much of his time scouring fast-moving text chains and social media feeds for incoming tips, which he says bubble up from “anyone and everywhere,” including X, where he has amassed nearly three million followers. Throughout the week, barely able to breathe, he broke news of one trade after the next, while appearing in a blitz of on-air ESPN SportsCenter appearances, including NBA Today, NBA Countdown, and The Pat McAfee Show.

“For everyone else, the Super Bowl was last weekend, but for me it was last week,” Charania recently told Loyola Today.

From the bottom, all the way up

Charania’s move to ESPN is the latest step in his meteoric rise as a sports journalist. Even before graduating high school, Charania was cold-calling agents and executives around the NBA and in Europe and writing up to 4,000 words a day for a Bulls blog on ChicagoNow, a former site owned by the Chicago Tribune. Soon he started attending Bulls practices and covering games for established news sites like RealGM. Eventually, his columns and news stories found their way into the pages of Yahoo Sports and The Athletic, a subscription-based sports vertical of The New York Times.

For some journalists, that kind of exposure would mark a career apotheosis, but not Charania, a handsome figure with a black, slicked-back shelf of hair and a TV-friendly face. He seized a rare opportunity to take his reporting and interviewing skills on air: first, for a digital sports network called Stadium in Chicago, and later, the cable and streaming network FanDuel TV, where he co-hosted a show called Run It Back with Michelle Beadle, Chandler Parsons, and Lou Williams.

By the time Charania’s contract with FanDuel TV expired in October, Adrian Wojnarowski, a former senior NBA Insider at ESPN known for his jaw-dropping scoops, or “Woj Bombs,” had retired from his role to become general manager for St. Bonaventure men’s basketball. ESPN’s thirst for 24/7 breaking news coverage aligned well with Charania’s hard-driving personality, and Wojnarowski was one of Charania’s early champions, hiring him at Yahoo Sports before the two rivals became the Lebron James and Nikola Jokić of breaking NBA news.

“Shams owns [NBA breaking news] to such a degree now that other reporters, who used to break news, are trying to compete by adding more color to stories, like the ‘why,’ and then maybe some TikToks of how things happen,” says Chris Reina, an executive editor at RealGM who hired Charania in summer 2012 and edited many of his stories. “Now that Adrian’s retired, Shams really has no peer.”

In Charania’s telling, his relentless drive stems largely from his NBA fandom and the tireless work ethic of his mother, Yasmeen Charania, a 58-year-old nurse at Evanston Hospital, who helped channel his “extreme tunnel vision” toward professional success, even if not always in her preferred direction.

“Where I come from, it’s like, be a doctor, be a lawyer, be a physician, something in that realm,” Charania says. “I think [my mother] is proud of me, for sure, but I also don’t think she makes me feel satisfied,” because to her “past accomplishments don’t really matter. It’s about how you are focusing on every single day and continuing to get better.”

Working ’round the clock

For Charania, a communications major at Loyola, juggling his career ambitions and coursework was a constant balancing act. During one class, he got a tip that Cleveland Cavaliers’ first overall NBA draft pick Anthony Bennett was being traded to the Minnesota Timberwolves. He stepped outside to take a call, and when he returned to class 20 minutes later, his professor pulled him aside for a refresher in class etiquette. “I doubt people in class knew what I was doing,” he says, smiling.

He chose Loyola, in part, because he could live at home in Skokie as a commuter student and be close to the nearby United Center, where he could cover Chicago Bulls games. When the Bulls refused to grant him a press credential as an 18-year-old college student, he reached out to Dan Smyczek at the Milwaukee Bucks’ PR department, who cleared him for courtside press access at the Bradley Center. The smaller media presence worked to his advantage. He began filing stories with RealGM as a freshman, while working to cure himself of imposter syndrome.

“I was definitely green,” he admits. But “being uncomfortable will allow you to become comfortable. You have to put yourself in a position to be vulnerable.”

He spent many nights driving to Milwaukee or Indianapolis, only to have to race home to Chicago to sneak in a few hours’ rest before early morning classes or final exams. The schedule was grueling. One night, after racking up his fourth speeding ticket, his car was towed and his mother had to bail him out of a holding cell. But the validation of writers he admired, like ESPN’s Brian Windhorst and Lee Jenkins of Sports Illustrated, who recognized his rare gift for getting players to open up, kept him pushing forward.

“I remember the first time I interviewed ‘Birdman’ Anderson, Chris Anderson, who used to play for the Miami Heat,” Charania says. “I didn’t know much about him. He looks like a cold person, tatted up, very quiet. I remember I did an interview with him, put it out, and Brian Windhorst shot me an email saying, ‘You did a great job with this interview. Chris Anderson has never spoken this much.’”

Reina also recognized Charania as a singular talent. “One of the things that struck me from the start was his maturity level,” Reina says. “He constructed advanced profiles for someone of that age who typically write pretty rudimentary college essays. These were detailed profiles and uncovered new ground with the subjects.”

Living, breathing basketball

If Charania’s schedule left him little time to socialize, his friendship with Loyola basketball players, like Donte Ingram (BA ’18), Ben Richardson (BBA ’18), and Clayton Custer (BBA ’18, MBA ’19), who played on the Cinderella team that made a run to the NCAA Final Four in 2018, kept him grounded.

“There were a lot of people around Loyola that had a lasting impact on me,” he says. “I have very vivid memories of sitting at the Damen Student Center trying to grind and talk to sources, while also scrambling to finish assignments and seeing Sister Jean [Dolores Schmidt] spending time with students.”

Loyola was also where Charania’s career took off, if not in a conventional way. At 19, he broke one of the most stunning trades of the 2013-2014 season, the Chicago Bulls’ swap of Luol Deng to the Cleveland Cavaliers for Andrew Bynum and draft picks. He had 4,000 new Twitter followers overnight.

“Before then I had just broken European deals, G League deals, 10-day contracts, maybe training camp invites, but to break a big trade like that, you see the door open up a little bit,” he says.

Many Ramblers players found inspiration in Charania, particularly after he graduated and came back to attend their practices the year of the Final Four run. “Once we started making that run in 2018, we ended up seeing him a lot more,” says Custer, now an assistant coach at the University of Oklahoma, who dropped the buzzer-beating shot against the University of Tennessee that sent the 2017-2018 Loyola team to the Sweet 16. “It just brought some pride to us that he went to Loyola, and he had made it big, getting all the scoops. And then, obviously, he was always a really supportive Loyola basketball fan.”

For a household TV celebrity, Charania leads a surprisingly modest life. When he’s not flying to Bristol or Los Angeles for in-studio ESPN appearances, he spends much of his time at home in Chicago’s north suburbs. He has a studio on the second floor, with a laptop, audio interface, and spotlights set up to allow him to go live on ESPN almost instantaneously.

On a display wall in the basement, photos memorialize key milestones in his career: A 2012 photo showing Dwyane Wade towering above Charania; a 2017 sit-down with Los Angeles Lakers legend Kobe Bryant just before the five-time NBA champion retired; a photo of Jerry Harkness, a two-time All American who led Loyola to the 1963 NCAA championship, appearing at the 2018 Final Four game between the University of Michigan and Loyola.

They are a reminder to Charania of how far he has come, but his eyes rarely linger for long.

“Anytime you’re young and trying to pursue something, there’s no template,” Charania says. “So, every day you’re continuing to build equity with people and understand it’s not just, ‘I need something, I need something.’ It’s trying to build genuine relationships with people. I’m not even six months into my ESPN career. So, I still have a lot to learn.”

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