With NBA free agency nearly over, it’s time for one of the league’s top insiders to hit the market.
Sources told The Post that Shams Charania’s contracts with The Athletic, now owned by The New York Times, Stadium and FanDuel are all set to expire within the next month or two.
Charania, who just turned 30 in April, is one of the sports world’s top newsbreakers.
The job of being the league’s top insider has been a staple in sports media for decades, dating back to newspaper titans like Peter Becksey, Will McDonough, Chris Mortensen and Peter Gammons who moved into television.
In the age of social media, top insiders are engagement factories: Charania has more than 3 million followers across X and Instagram combined.
It’s a good time for Charania to sign a new contract because, in theory, there are more potential buyers now than there were two years ago when he was last a free agent.
The NBA is reportedly on the verge of signing new television deals with NBC and Amazon, something basketball writers, broadcasters and production staff have been waiting for for years as both networks would need to build staffing from scratch.
In 2022, Charania re-signed with Stadium and The Athletic and earned a third job with FanDuel.
Charania’s reporting goes beyond the “what” question to delve into the “why.”
For example, in January of this year, Charania and Jovan Buha Co-authored the story “The rift between Darvin Ham and the Lakers’ locker room is widening,” he said.
The article detailed various specific complaints from Lakers players about Ham’s lineup changes, foreshadowing the coach’s firing by the team after failing to qualify for the NBA play-in tournament.
Charania declined to comment to The Washington Post about his current free agent activities.
