Earlier in the week, there was considerable speculation surrounding the Los Angeles Lakers pursuit of UConn Huskies men’s basketball head coach Dan Hurley to fill the team’s head coaching vacancy. Hurley ultimately chose to stay at the University of Connecticut, a decision that elicited both surprise and relief in the basketball world, but his candidacy was relatively unknown before a report from ESPN senior basketball insider Adrian Wojnarowski. The report of Hurley being the frontrunner for the job came after Shams Charania, senior NBA insider at The Athletic, reported that NBA on ESPN analyst JJ Redick was the frontrunner instead.
Charania, who also works for Stadium and FanDuel TV outside of his reporting at The Athletic, appeared on ESPN Wednesday afternoon within The Pat McAfee Show where he outlined the Lakers coaching search and Hurley’s decision. Dan Le Batard, hosting an abridged version of The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz due to severe weather in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, spoke about how he recently read a Substack by Ethan Strauss that mentioned the rivalry between Wojnarowski and Charania.
“It’s King Kong and Godzilla of the information business, and Shams learned it from his mentor [Wojnarowski], who is the most competitive person I’ve ever met in sports media, who has relationships with the executives, with the old guard in basketball – the people who have controlled all of the power in basketball,” Le Batard said. “And his protégé, who is 30 years old and much different than him, traffics in the information from labor, from the players, and so there has been a fight at the top of the food chain.”
Le Batard, who used to host on radio and television for ESPN, explained to co-host Jon “Stugotz” Weiner that Wojnarowski is one of the best sportswriters he had ever seen. As the world of disseminating information has changed though, Le Batard stated that Wojnarowski does not write in that manner anymore and is instead divulging “cubes of information” as fast as he can because of money, power and interest in the craft. Although Charania has been a guest on The Pat McAfee Show before since it began broadcasting the first two hours of the program on ESPN last year, Le Batard felt that this particular appearance carried extra merit.
“To see Shams on McAfee is such a ‘F**k you’ from McAfee to Woj and the established infrastructure,” Le Batard said. “No one is allowed on ESPN basketball stuff until Shams on McAfee that Woj isn’t good with. To see his enemy in the middle of the workday on McAfee is hugely interesting to me, and then to see them this far apart on what the Lakers were doing and fighting at the top of the information food chain to produce a story around Hurley that I don’t think any of us but Woj saw coming – like that was not something that people were talking about before Woj reported it after Shams had reported JJ Redick is the frontrunner.”
“I’m with you,” Weiner concurred. “No one saw this coming; the Laker job coming. It is interesting with McAfee because he is doing that just to piss of Woj, and believe me, it pisses of Woj.”
Wojnarowski and Charania previously worked together at Yahoo Sports on “The Vertical” where they broke news of several transactions within the NBA over the years. While Charania was in his junior year of college, Wojnarowski had called him “the best young basketball reporter on the planet.” A rivalry between the two reporters began to develop through the years and became noticeable to fans when Wojnarowski joined ESPN in 2017 and Charania moved to The Athletic and Stadium in the next year.
The aforementioned Strauss detailed the relationship between Wojnarowski and Charania in a Substack article in October 2021, in which he states that they are “highly motivated to beat one another in a battle for speed, conducted over Twitter, a medium built for it.” After Hurley rejected the Lakers’ reported offer, Charania stated on FanDuel TV that Hurley was not the No. 1 candidate for the job from the start, which was viewed by some people as a disputation of Wojnarowski’s report.
