Shams Charania on joining ESPN after Woj's retirement

Shams Charania talked to CNBC about joining ESPN to replace rival and former mentor Adrian Wojnarowski, aka Woj, as the network's NBA insider.

The man of the week is Shams Charania. Just weeks after ESPN basketball reporter Adrian Wojnarowski shocked the sports world by announcing his retirement from journalism, ESPN scooped up Woj’s main rival and one-time protege, Charania. 

The timing is fortuitous. As it happened, Charania’s contracts with his previous employers FanDuel TV and The Athletic expired at the end of September. His deal with digital sports media outlet Stadium ended in August.

Now he’s all ESPN’s, and you can plan to see him on your TV screens quite often. Charania begins his ESPN TV work today. He was kind enough to give me his first exclusive interview since joining the Worldwide Leader in Sports (Don’t tell ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro I called it that!).

“It’s definitely going to be a lot of TV,” Charania said. “All the shows you think about: ‘NBA Today,’ ‘NBA Countdown,’ ‘Get Up,’ ‘Sportscenter,’ ‘The Pat McAfee Show.’ I feel like the last six years have really helped prepare me for this moment, and I’m excited to continue to use and share in this platform and the behemoth that is ESPN.”

The Shams vs. Woj rivalry has come to define NBA reporting and was a major piece of the league’s fan culture. I wrote about the phenomenon in early 2022. Two men, battling for scoops, with the Twitter universe rooting them on or dunking on the reporter that failed to be first. They worked together at Yahoo Sports before becoming rivals, only for Charania to eventually take over for Wojnarowski at ESPN. A Shakespearean plot! 

https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/nba/shams-charania-espn-woj-retirement-rcna174872

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