Shams Charania

Shams Charania is the lead senior NBA insider for The Athletic and Stadium. In 2022, Charania partnered with FanDuel, becoming the first insider to partner with a sportsbook. He regularly appears on the hit show Run it Back on FanDuel TV. With his wide network of connections and well-placed sources, Shams continually breaks the biggest scoops and stories from around the NBA. Followed by fans from around the world, he has built a reputation as one of the most skilled young reporters in professional sports.

As one of the faces of Stadium’s on-air, news-breaking group, Shams has recorded interviews with some of the biggest names in the game, including Anthony Davis, Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, Luka Doncic, Kyrie Irving, Klay Thompson and more. He previously served as Yahoo Sports’ national NBA insider from 2015-18.

In January 2014, Shams broke a story that put him on the map, reporting for RealGM.com that Chicago Bulls star Luol Deng had been traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers for Andrew Bynum and draft picks. One year later, Shams joined the team at Yahoo Sports and was hailed as the “best young basketball reporter on the planet.”

The Chicago-born son of Pakistani immigrants, Shams pushed himself hard from an early age to pursue his dream of covering the NBA. While at New Trier High School, he started a blog on the Chicago Bulls for ChicagoNow, a subsidiary of the Chicago Tribune, where he’d write every day and recap every game for free to try to build up a body of work. At the age of 17, he set out to build a network of sources by cold-calling as many agents and team executives from around the NBA and Europe as he could find information on. Shams carried this work ethic with him to Loyola University, where he continued to build his name by writing and breaking news.