4 min read
Mahdi Atif
Jacket, tank, and trousers by Hermès; link bracelets by David Yurman; gold bracelets, Charania’s own.
He is having the night of his life. Thirty-one-year-old Shams Charania is ESPN’s Senior NBA Insider, but not tonight. Tonight he’s at his cousin’s wedding in Toronto, where drinks are flowing, music is blasting, and he’s trying not to check his phone. A single text message slices through his defenses: The Phoenix Suns are close to a deal to trade Kevin Durant to the Houston Rockets.
“As soon as I got that text, I wasn’t dancing anymore,” Charania tells me now.
Charania remembers every trade he’s ever reported, including Houston’s earth-shattering move during what was meant to be a night off. After receiving that text, it was on to fact-checking, then catching a flight back to Oklahoma City to report the news live on TV because, as if all of that weren’t enough, the trade went down right before game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals. (He also dropped the bomb on social media.) “How these things usually work out is that the fifteen minutes you’re not on your phone?” Charania warns. “You miss it.”
Unfortunately, a night cut short isn’t uncommon for Charania. On a typical day, he spends nearly every waking minute on his phone—fielding tips from his sources like he’s a code breaker updating the front lines about the enemy’s shifting battle plans. It’s why, if you pay any attention to the NBA, it’s downright impossible to name a recent league-altering trade that we didn’t learn about from Charania’s thumbs. Even though most NBA fans may not know much about the man behind the machine, they do know one thing: keep your notifications turned on.
Mahdi Atif
Shirt and trousers by Canali; shoes by John Lobb; socks by Falke.
When the Dallas Mavericks sent Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis last year—arguably the most shocking trade in NBA history—it was Charania’s tweet that informed the world about it . . . including Dončić and Davis. “I’ll never forget,” Charania says. “I called one source directly involved and asked, ‘Is this fucking real?’ I never said what it was. The person goes, ‘Yeah, it’s real.’ I was stunned.” The deal was so unfathomable that even NBA owners thought Charania was hacked. That’s his level of trust, mind you—he must’ve been hacked, because there was no way Shams Charania would ever misreport a story.
“I was writing a college paper when I broke Luol Deng getting traded, and I was nineteen. It was like, What the hell am I doing?”
How’s this for a grindset? Starting at just seventeen years old, as a kid in Skokie, Illinois, Charania worked his way up from ChicagoNow and RealGM to Yahoo! Sports and later The Athletic, cold-emailing agents and hovering outside the Chicago Bulls locker room for quotes while masking his real age. Even when the Bulls found out that he was a teenager and revoked his press access, Charania drove the extra hour and a half to Milwaukee to cover Bucks games. “It would be the night before a final exam, and I’m driving home at four in the morning,” Charania recalls. “I was writing a college paper when I broke Luol Deng getting traded, and I was nineteen. It was like, What the hell am I doing?”
His hustle eventually earned praise from veteran reporter Adrian Wojnarowski—his future mentor and the man he would replace at ESPN in 2024 following Woj’s retirement. ESPN was the validation Charania fought for, but he later realized that it wasn’t what fueled him. The first-generation American son of Pakistani immigrants, he says he learned his determined (yet probably unhealthy) work ethic from his mom—a Chicago nurse. “She’s put her whole life into her job, everything before herself,” says Charania. “I don’t like that she does that, but I can see how I got the same traits.”
Mahdi Atif
Jacket, trousers, and shoes by Dries Van Noten; shirt and tie by Brunello Cucinelli; link bracelets by David Yurman; socks by Falke.
Charania’s job also precludes any pretense of enjoying a life outside of work. Based in Chicago, he flies all over the country chasing tips and intel from the trenches of the NBA. “There’s definitely a paranoia about sleeping or about missing a call that could lead to the next big scoop,” he says. “You can’t be first to everything, but that’s the name of the game.”
Now that Charania is on TV more at ESPN, he says he’s striving to improve his reporting so that he can add even more depth to his stories. He wants to perfect the idea of a modern journalist—which means mastering all of the mediums all at once—even if it feels like he’s already at the top of his field. “You never know when something could happen,” he reminds me, and he says he wouldn’t trade that feeling for the world. Not even if they threw in a couple first-round picks. Not even if he’s on the dance floor.
Photographed by Mahdi Atif @mahdiatif
Styled by Alfonso Fernández Navas @Alfonsofn
Grooming by Jaycie Ganek @yassie10
Production by Verytaste, Chicago @cinemaverytaste
Esquire Visual Director: James Morris @james_alexander_photo
Esquire Senior Entertainment Director: Andrea Cuttler @angcutt
As an assistant editor at Esquire, Rosenberg covers film, TV, sports, anime, music, and video games. When he’s not trying to remember character names from House of the Dragon, you can find him theorizing about the future of Yellowstone, or putting another hundred hours into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Rosenberg’s standout stories include an interview with Olympic breakdancing athlete Victor Montalvo, a pitch to the Oscars to add a Best Animal Actor category, and a plea for Hollywood to fix bad movie titles. His past work can be found at Spin, Insider, and his personal blog at Roseandblog.com. What’s one piece of life advice that Josh can give? A movie a day keeps the doctor away.
Follow Rosenberg on Twitter/X @Roseandblog and check out his “Good Movie List” on Letterboxd: @Movies4MePlease