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The work of an N.B.A. scoop merchant can be solitary, even antisocial: texts with execs, D.M.s with players, phone calls with agents, all carefully out of earshot of interlopers. Earlier this week, Shams Charania, perhaps the foremost breaker of basketball news—he tweets trades, signings, and draft picks, sometimes seconds before their official announcement—was making a rare public appearance, in the lobby of the Westin in Times Square. He’d been in town for three days to prepare for the N.B.A. draft, which would be held the following evening in Brooklyn. He’d only occasionally left his hotel room, and had just wrapped a self-shot video urgently alerting the world that the Boston Celtics were pursuing a trade for Kristaps Porzingis, the former Knicks All-Star. Charania’s sister had encouraged him to go sightseeing. “I’ll walk three blocks and be, like, Get me back to my room,” he said.
He sat before a MacBook with his iPhone in hand, wearing a black bomber jacket and, in his left ear, an AirPod. The Westin is the preferred pre-draft hotel for N.B.A. types, so it’s an ideal place to work sources. A number of conspicuously tall, conspicuously young men were milling about. Victor Wembanyama, the seven-foot-three, nineteen-year-old Frenchman who would be the draft’s top selection, ambled into a nearby conference room.
Charania, who is five feet nine, scrolled constantly on his two screens, his face intermittently slack with focus. He put the phone to his ear. “Is that what you’re hearing, or are you asking?” he said, eying his laptop. “I’ll find out.”
He has two million followers on Twitter, who know him by the mononym Shams, and is more famous than the majority of players. His own athletic career was brief. As a basketball-crazed teen in the Chicago suburbs, he played on his high school’s freshman team. “But, like, I didn’t play, ever,” he said. (His self-scouting report: “Straight shooter, no defense.”) He launched a blog about the sport and began cold-calling industry types whose numbers he found online. “The good thing about the phone or texting is they’re not gonna ask how old you are,” he said. When he was a twenty-one-year-old studying communications at Loyola University Chicago, he was hired by Yahoo. (Today, he is employed by the sports sites The Athletic and Stadium, and by the sports-betting company FanDuel.) His parents, Pakistani immigrants who have worked in the medical field, remained unsure. “My mom was, like, ‘It’s not too late to change your major,’ ” Charania said. Soon, he began outscooping veteran colleagues.
“If I wasn’t a reporter, I’d still be obsessing over all this stuff, in a basement somewhere,” he said. He opened his phone’s screen-time page. The previous day’s usage: eighteen hours. He swiped through other days, each showing upward of seventeen hours. One dipped to sixteen hours and thirty-four minutes. “My mom’s birthday,” he explained. The draft is a particularly busy time, but, really, there are no idle periods. Once, on a family trip to the Grand Canyon, he was distraught to find that he had no cell service. A nearby library had Wi-Fi. “I was there the whole time,” he said. He searched his phone for a photo to prove that he had at least seen the canyon, but couldn’t find one.
Charania’s connectedness has paid off in unexpected ways. In 2020, he was credited by many with breaking the news of Donald Trump’s positive COVID test. Some have speculated that Charania simply saw Trump’s own announcement, which the President tweeted the same minute as Charania’s, and quickly re-stated it. He declined to clarify. “That’ll be a story for my book,” he said, smirking.
Every few minutes, he retreated to the lobby’s work-center annex to field a call with a brisk “What up?” He returned from one of these proudly displaying the draft of a tweet reporting that the Celtics were in “strong talks” to complete the Porzingis trade. He winked and hit Tweet. An agent sidled up to the table where he was working to debate a prospect’s true height. (“He’s six-six without shoes,” the agent said.)
Within an hour, the Porzingis video had garnered more than six hundred thousand views and two million impressions. Charania had no plans to leave the hotel that day. His summer aspirations consisted mostly of staying home, in Chicago, and working his sources with calls and texts. “If you miss even a day, you fall so far behind,” he said. “That scares me.” ♦
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