A strange media dustup has emerged in recent days, after ESPN\u2019s Shams Charania reported that Oklahoma City\u2019s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has won the 2025-26 NBA MVP award.<\/p>\n
The report upstaged Prime Video\u2019s official announcement of the winner, prompting Prime Video\u2019s Blake Griffin to say on the air, \u201cIt\u2019s Sunday Shams, go to brunch you nerd.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beyond Prime Video\u2019s understandable frustration at having its thunder stolen by the premature naming of the Thunder guard as the league\u2019s MVP, the situation has created a debate over whether Shams should have kept his sherbet-hole shut.<\/p>\n
He absolutely should have reported it. Not because it\u2019s what reporters do, but because who cares if the NBA MVP winner was leaked before the official announcement?<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t like tipping picks for the first round of the NFL draft. The vast majority of the audience wants to find out the picks when the Commissioner announces them. No one is sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for the name of the NBA MVP to be revealed.<\/p>\n
Also, from a reporting standpoint, it\u2019s far more impressive to learn the name of a league MVP before it\u2019s announced. The names of the next two or three NFL first-round picks are known by many people. Every team knows. Multiple people with each team know. The identity of the NBA MVP is presumably far more closely guarded.<\/p>\n
Whether the NBA will be happy about the move is a different issue. The NFL has told its broadcast partners to instruct their reporters and on-air analysts to not tip draft picks. (Not everyone complies. We do, but only because that\u2019s what we believe the audience wants.)<\/p>\n
Reporting on the winners of awards is a different issue entirely. That\u2019s fair game. Regardless of whether the NBA or the NFL like it.<\/p>\n
Which raises an interesting question for February 2027. Will the usual \u201cinsiders\u201d try to find out who the NFL MVP is before the name is announced? Will other reporters who aren\u2019t beholden to the broader football apparatus pursue the information?<\/p>\n
It may be impossible to get. And it\u2019s possible that Charania wasn\u2019t even trying to get it. Information like this is routinely given to a hand-picked reporter. It\u2019s possible that Charania\u2019s scoop originated with someone who had a specific motivation to get the word out before the award was officially announced.<\/p>\n
Regardless, it\u2019s fair game. Shams was doing his job. And no one was counting down the hours, minutes, and seconds for the drum roll preceding the formal announcement of the NBA\u2019s next MVP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A strange media dustup has emerged in recent days, after ESPN\u2019s Shams Charania reported that Oklahoma City\u2019s Shai…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652880,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-652879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652879\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}