Woj vs. Shams is the NBA’s ‘only real rivalry’

A few minutes later, Adrian Wojnarowski — or Woj, as ESPN’s star NBA reporter is known — tweeted the news. Puzzled, the reporter asked his colleague, Shams Charania, what he thought.

Charania, known by his first name, is the Athletic’s answer to Woj, tasked with breaking every NBA transaction. And Shams had a hunch what happened: The agent gave the news to Woj after the reporter asked for confirmation.

“Confirming news with certain people is the same as texting it straight to Woj,” Shams explained, according to the reporter.

Like many of the journalists who spoke to The Washington Post for this story, the Athletic reporter spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing the professional repercussions that lurk in a business so dominated by two men. When they do talk, journalists and NBA officials are unequivocal that the scoop wars of the modern NBA are controlled by Woj, a 54-year-old newspaper veteran from Connecticut, and his former protégé, Shams, 29, who launched his career from his parents’ house in the Chicago suburbs.

Their dynamic has become a fascination of the league, with fans lining up to cheer them on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and to keep score of their performances on the internet and even in NBA locker rooms. Kawhi Leonard to the Clippers? Woj. Rudy Gobert has covid? Shams. Kevin Durant to the Warriors? Woj again. Both boast millions of X followers (6 million for Woj, 2 million for Shams). Both are recognized by every NBA fan with an X account.

They so own NBA news that one former league executive told The Post that they are the only NBA reporters who matter. A former Athletic executive said it might not even be worth having an NBA vertical without Shams. Shams has starred in an AT&T commercial, and Woj has been a T-Mobile pitchman. The suggestion is that they are always connected.

It doesn’t hurt that each is known by a single-syllable mononym, nor that Woj was once a mentor to Shams, hiring him for his first big job. Now, multiple NBA reporters and officials describe their relationship as something akin to Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, the tension between them spilling across their respective galaxies. One editor said the Athletic doesn’t want Woj tweets dropped into company Slack channels because Shams doesn’t like to see them; ESPN reporters, in turn, are discouraged from tweeting Athletic stories or inviting Athletic guests onto their podcasts. Neither reporter acknowledges the other publicly.

“It’s the only real rivalry left in the NBA,” NBA reporter Frank Isola said. “Everyone else likes each other.”

It would be naive to think of Woj vs. Shams as a petty feud. The NBA has billed itself as the league of the future, digitally savvy and popular with younger fans. More than any sport’s, its popularity is fueled by player movement — who’s getting drafted, who’s signing where, who’s demanding a trade. Being first to that news keeps fans’ attention on your platform, which is what makes the stakes so high for Woj, Shams and their respective employers. Woj has a five-year contract worth around $7 million per year, the New York Post reported, while Shams’s pay is approaching $2 million from salaries at the Athletic and TV network Stadium, according to multiple people familiar with the terms.

With those stakes has come controversy. Last year, the New York Times purchased the Athletic, making Shams one of the most famous (and highest-paid) reporters at the company. The Times allowed him to do work for a sportsbook, FanDuel, which irked rank-and-file Times staffers. People in the NBA, meanwhile, have wondered if Woj helps his sources almost as much as he breaks news.

Still, as important as Woj and Shams have become, a kind of omerta permeates their world. Both turned down repeated interview requests, as did their representatives and many of the agents, officials and reporters who work with them. Approached in the lobby of a hotel in Las Vegas during the NBA Summer League, one agent was asked about the two reporters. “Snitches get stitches,” he replied. He was probably kidding, but he wasn’t laughing, and he definitely didn’t talk.

Woj grew up in a working-class Catholic family in Bristol, Conn., near where the ESPN campus sprouted up in 1979, when Woj was 10. He was a die-hard Celtics and Red Sox fan and played baseball in high school, but he was always a basketball junkie, known in pickup games for his scrappy play and passable jump shot.

His first big scoop came during his sophomore year at St. Bonaventure. He learned the new coach of the basketball team, but with the school’s newspaper only publishing weekly, he was worried about losing the scoop. Along with classmate Mike Vaccaro, now a sports columnist at the New York Post, he placed the story with a local TV station.

After college, Woj covered Connecticut basketball before he was hired as a columnist in Fresno, Calif., and then at the Bergen Record in New Jersey, where he was twice named columnist of the year by the Associated Press Sports Editors.

In 2008, Woj landed at Yahoo, where he became the most-read NBA columnist in the country. Twitter revolutionized reporting around that time. Suddenly every NBA reporter could break any news instantly, and Woj leaned in. To friends, it was a testament to his doggedness. “He talked to the third assistant coach on the bench when no one thought to do that,” Vaccaro said. He once told a journalism class that the secret to breaking news was talking to a source as much as possible without asking for news.

As he rose, though, critics derided Woj’s willingness to write scathingly about sources who seemed not to cooperate (such as LeBron James). The New Republic reported in 2014 that the NBA once fined former Pistons executive Joe Dumars $500,000 for leaking league documents to Woj. Dumars was the subject of several flattering stories.

In 2011, Woj reached a new level of fame when he tweeted teams’ draft picks ahead of their announcement on ESPN, deflating the draft’s drama and embarrassing the NBA and its media partner. It showed the power of Twitter and was, in many ways, a glimpse of the future of sports media.

Shams, who is Pakistani American, grew up in the north Chicago suburbs, his rise a digital-era sprint that bore no resemblance to Woj’s newspaper days. He was cut from his high school basketball team but, still obsessed with the game, reached out to a local website looking to do some basketball writing. “I remember asking if he had permission from his parents,” his editor once recalled.

Shams parlayed that into a gig at a national website, RealGM, but the Bulls wouldn’t credential a teenager, so he drove to Milwaukee for games. He once tailed the Bucks’ Brandon Jennings to the players’ parking lot to ask him about his impending free agency.

In his earliest days, Shams broke news about G League contracts or 10-day deals with smaller-name players — stories so small that other reporters weren’t interested. “Who freaking cares about breaking a two-way contract?” asked David Falk, a longtime NBA agent. “But it’s a great way to curry favor with an agent.”

He tweeted his stories at Woj and complimented his columns, too. His big break came in 2014 when he was in college at Loyola Chicago and broke the news that the Bulls had traded star Luol Deng. Woj noticed. “Big-time story break by the best young reporter in business,” he tweeted.

The next year, Woj pitched media companies about launching his own basketball vertical, with Shams as part of the team. “Shams was openly acknowledged as his apostle, and Woj didn’t discourage that,” said someone who was pitched by Woj. “He encouraged you to think of him that way.”

When Yahoo launched the vertical, Shams was a key hire — while he was a junior in college.

According to people familiar with their relationship, Woj introduced Shams to executives and agents. But the partnership wasn’t always smooth. One point of contention was a Complex magazine profile of Shams that featured a splashy photo spread, a star turn that Woj thought was distracting from the work, according to people who were told about the incident.

In 2017, ESPN hired Woj. According to John Kosner, the ESPN executive who led the move, the offer was to bring his entire team, including Shams. Several members of Woj’s team joined him at ESPN, but Shams, who was under contract, wanted to stay. He and Woj were officially competitors.

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In the summer of 2015, Falk, who made his name (and fortune) repping Michael Jordan, had a client hit free agency. Several teams were in the running, but the player, Greg Monroe, ultimately chose Milwaukee. When Falk called then-Bucks owner Marc Lasry to tell him the good news, he asked him to keep it quiet until he relayed it to the other teams.

Before the phone call was over, Woj had tweeted the news. “I was livid,” Falk said.

Falk wasn’t the only one to notice Woj’s influence. Ken Berger, a former NBA reporter for Newsday and CBS Sports, said that around that time he reached out to Phoenix General Manager Ryan McDonough to confirm some news. Within minutes, Woj had tweeted it. Only after Woj’s tweet did McDonough text back to confirm, which convinced Berger that McDonough had tipped off Woj with his scoop.

“I couldn’t break news that I had,” Berger said. “I thought I could compete on hard work and relationships, but I was wrong.”

McDonough did not respond to a message seeking comment. Berger left the business and now works as a health and wellness coach.

Some viewed this dominance as the culmination of years of source building and work ethic. Woj, who takes red-eyes at every opportunity to avoid missing news, had been cultivating assistant coaches and front-office staffers as sources for decades. Now they were getting promoted to bigger jobs. Those relationship skills didn’t only apply to sources, his friends say: Just like he built up Shams, he helped Malika Andrews climb the ranks from a college reporter to an ESPN star.

Others saw success fueled by Woj framing stories in ways that are plainly helpful to sources. He is a pioneer of shouting out agents and agencies when a player signs. When Kevin Durant re-signed with the Nets, Woj encouraged his followers to “read more” at Durant’s own website.

When he broke the news that former Celtics coach Ime Udoka was facing a suspension for violating “unspecified” team guidelines, his initial report noted that Udoka had just led the team to the NBA Finals. Not long afterward, Shams reported that Udoka was accused of an improper relationship with a co-worker, though he called it consensual before reporting that Udoka also made unwanted comments. (Woj later broke the news that Udoka sent crude text messages to the woman.)

Woj’s relationship with front-office veteran Neil Olshey was one of those Woj carefully cultivated, after they met two decades ago at a high school basketball tournament. Olshey eventually became the GM in Portland, where he told beat reporters that he gave his news to Woj because the beat reporters “couldn’t help him,” according to two people familiar with the remarks. Over the years, Woj has given Olshey the benefit of the doubt in his coverage, which has been noted by former Blazers star Damian Lillard, too. (Olshey declined to comment.)

However the scoops come, people around the league said a report by Woj carries more weight than one by anyone else, including Shams.

Shams left Yahoo for the Athletic and Stadium in 2018 and joined FanDuel last year. He, too, has built his life around the job, avoiding dates to focus on scoops. Around the league, he is legendary for his fire-hose approach to texting: dozens of texts at a time to get a single piece of news or just to keep in touch with sources. One Shams source said he reaches out whenever the source’s favorite team is winning games. “I once got a birthday text from Shams out of the blue,” said a person who worked in an NBA front office. “I have no idea how he knew my birthday.”

Woj is often described as a mafia don around the league, while Shams is more of a golden retriever. Partly because Woj can be so polarizing, there is an opening for Shams. “If you don’t like Woj, you talk to Shams,” a former ESPN editor said.

Shams is more likely to induce eye rolls from other reporters around the league for some of his reports. He recently tweeted that the Suns and their “driven, dynamic ownership” were “solely focused on a championship” after firing their coach. And while Woj is viewed as closer to coaches and general managers (he talks to players, too), Shams has cultivated relationships with players such as Kyrie Irving and James Harden and is making inroads with a younger crop of owners, including Alex Rodriguez.

In cultivating that access, Shams, too, has been accused of favoring his relationships to get news: Athletic staffers complained to editors about a Shams story on Irving’s decision not to receive a coronavirus vaccination, in which he wrote that Irving, according to anonymous people in the piece, wanted to be a “voice for the voiceless.”

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People in the NBA say both reporters badger them to give them news, even five seconds ahead of their rival. But while there is plenty of tittering when Woj or Shams tweets news eight seconds ahead of the other, league stakeholders are really strategizing.

Agents and front offices talk about which reporter to feed news to or how they might keep news from getting out. Front offices have shrunk the number of people privy to information to keep Woj or Shams from reporting it, executives said. One former GM said he once had his IT team check an employee’s emails to see if he had been leaking and found he had been emailing Woj the team’s internal business.

Mostly, though, league officials have accepted the dynamic and tried to leverage it. Multiple people involved in NBA business marveled at how quickly news spreads when Woj or Shams breaks it, saying there is no better way to get a narrative out than to seed it with Woj or Shams. Ethan Strauss, a former NBA reporter for ESPN who now writes a newsletter on Substack, reported that Woj has sent around a document highlighting his reach on social media compared to rivals such as Shams.

Woj and Shams are also useful to front-office members trying to circumvent the league’s tampering rules, according to two former executives. One said he had signaled his team’s interest in a player by telling Shams, knowing he would deliver the message to a team or an agent. The reporters also know what every team and agent is up to, as well as which teams might soon have job openings, making them valuable sources themselves. Owners, one agent said, ask Woj for hiring recommendations on coaches and general managers. “You can’t have them mad at you because then you don’t have access to their information,” a former executive said.

“These aren’t one-sided relationships,” said Dan Marks, who spent nearly a decade in the Milwaukee front office. “The reporters get scoops; they get traffic. On the flip side, you get insight into job opportunities or favorable coverage. There are GMs who get fired where you look at it and Woj will say it’s mutual. But he’s saying mutually parted ways because it seems better for that person.”

Or, as Falk put it: “Woj built a network of moles. It’s a group of people who have decided they have more loyalty to Woj than to the teams they work for.”

Worldwide leader in scoops

ESPN has built its coverage of the country’s biggest sports around three breaking news reporters: Woj, Adam Schefter (NFL) and Jeff Passan (MLB). It’s evidenced by the salaries they receive — Schefter makes $9 million per year, according to the New York Post — that they have become the most important people in the newsroom. Even if they break news on X, executives can program a day’s worth of news and still drive digital traffic with their scoops. Clearly, fans are interested, too.

“I think you have to believe that your brand matters — that Woj’s association with ESPN gives it more importance and gravitas and that he brings people back to the platform when he breaks news,” a former ESPN executive said. “That he’s creating more engaged sports fans, and the more you’re engaged in sports, the more you’re going to consume ESPN.”

Building coverage around Woj’s scoops has led to tension. Multiple former and current people involved with ESPN’s NBA coverage said reporters feel they should avoid stories that could be unfavorable to a Woj source, and colleagues said they have the impression that they shouldn’t tweet negative things about teams because it doesn’t help Woj break news. The idea, multiple people echoed, is you should be extremely careful with the pipeline of news.

Tim MacMahon, a longtime ESPN NBA reporter, said he had never been waved off a subject and that Woj often helped him confirm stories. “He’s an intense dude,” MacMahon said. “To do that job you have to be wired a certain way. I don’t know when he sleeps.”

Shams and the Athletic are playing a different version of the same game. It launched in 2016 with a simple model: hire sportswriters with big Twitter followings to drive awareness and, in turn, subscriptions. Shams was like a digital billboard and among its most important hires.

Under the Times, the Athletic has sought to replicate ESPN’s insider model. David Perpich, the Athletic’s publisher, told The Post last year that he had expected coverage of big events such as the Super Bowl to be popular but that it was outpaced by free agency and trade interest. A former Times sports editor, Jason Stallman, said he was “dazzled” by Shams’s work. And since the Athletic’s new editor in chief, Steven Ginsberg, took over this year, he has stressed to staff the importance of breaking more news, multiple Athletic staffers said.

The Athletic re-signed Shams last year and is paying him between $600,000 and $700,000, according to two people familiar with the terms. The Athletic also recently hired Dianna Russini away from ESPN to be its NFL insider, and she is paid more than Shams, according to multiple people familiar with the terms. (Shams’s representatives contacted ESPN during contract negotiations to gauge interest, though no substantive talks took place, according to a person with knowledge of the outreach.)

Last year, gambling company FanDuel hired Shams to be a paid contributor on its TV network, marking a new frontier for insider reporters. Ahead of the NBA draft this year, Charania tweeted that a player was gaining steam to be drafted second, causing betting lines to swing wildly. The player wasn’t selected second, and FanDuel bettors wagering on Charania’s info lost.

That apparent conflict of interest was troubling enough in the Times newsroom that a staffer raised the issue in an all-staff Slack channel after The Washington Post covered it. “I was pretty surprised to see a NYT spokesman defending a sports reporter for The Athletic who also takes money from a sports gambling website while reporting on sports,” read the Slack note, which was shared with The Post. “That tangled relationship could cause all sorts of ethical problems…but what was also odd to me was that the NYT was then in a position where it was defending behavior that it would almost surely condemn if the perpetrator was an NYT Sports reporter.”

In response, Perpich wrote the Athletic shares core values and standards with the Times, stands behind Shams’s work and is continuing to evaluate guidelines for outside work.

The larger point, NBA reporters and officials said, is that Woj and Shams, and their perceived value to fans, media executives and the league, have changed NBA journalism. Woj was once a must-read columnist, but much of his coverage now is news. There is a belief that everything Woj and Shams do now is in service of the next scoop, and they have become so good at it that beat writers, who used to battle for news, have mostly given up chasing it.

Woj and Shams are less journalists in the traditional sense than they are part of the league’s whirring machinery, both publicly and privately. Woj is represented by Creative Artists Agency, which also represents a whole roster of players, coaches and general managers. Shams is repped by the Montag Group, part of the Wasserman agency, which represents players, coaches and GMs, too.

“The role of the media is to police the powerful,” said former ESPN NBA editor Henry Abbott, who launched a new media company, TrueHoop. “They have to kiss the a — of the powerful: ‘Please text me first when you’re making a trade.’ You’re begging for scraps. They confine their insight into the league to these transactions, which are the cotton candy of news. We miss the doping and the money laundering and everything else that’s happening in the NBA.”

Abbott believes the league holds fewer news conferences and talks to fewer reporters because it can give everything it wants to Woj or Shams.

Isola, the veteran NBA reporter, said that the problem was more on the rest of the NBA press corps, which could be digging more into controversial stories such as Ja Morant’s concerning behavior and Udoka’s firing. “It’s a personal thing and not an easy story,” he said. “But it’s there.”

Last week, Shams tweeted breaking news that Damian Lillard was traded to Toronto. But he was wrong. Lillard was actually traded to the Bucks, which Woj gleefully reported. Inside ESPN, colleagues and executives viewed it as a perfect example of Woj’s value, making ESPN the authority on the biggest story of the day.

Shams deleted his tweet. It was a blip, to be sure, but within a few hours he had tweeted a link to a new story that he co-wrote: “How the Damian Lillard-Bucks blockbuster came together.” And then, no doubt, he went looking for his next scoop.