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The drama surrounding Shams Charania’s report that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander won this year’s NBA MVP award illustrated the differences between how the NFL and NBA deal with reporters at their broadcast rights partners.
Charania—whose job is to break news—scooped the announcement that the league office had been planning to reveal Gilgeous-Alexander had won MVP during Amazon’s pregame show before Game 7 of Cavaliers-Pistons on Sunday. The Prime Video studio crew chided Charania for stepping on its “exclusive,” with Blake Griffin joking Charania should have been doing something else, like going to brunch, on a Sunday morning.
That such a conflict even occurred demonstrates the differences between the NBA and NFL media spaces. This, frankly, never would have happened with a reporter at an NFL league rights partner. The idea of Ian Rapoport or Adam Schefter breaking the news of an award winner before the NFL Honors ceremony—which in the past has been simulcast on NFL Network and the Super Bowl broadcaster that year, and is migrating to Netflix next year—is borderline unfathomable.
In 2015, the league office sent a letter to the heads of all the networks who were rights partners at the time effectively decreeing that their reporters would not tip NFL Draft picks.
“We believe that keeping this information embargoed to the extent possible clearly enhances the viewer experience for the Draft. The result is a better presentation for the 32 million viewers who watched Round 1 in 2014 and the 45.7 million who watched across all three days,” the letter from former NFL VP of broadcasting Howard Katz said, in part. “Please have your reporters and other personnel refrain from revealing picks on social media or other platforms before they are announced in the Draft broadcasts.”
This letter even applied to reporters at outlets who were not airing the draft, and it is a policy that has been hammered home to all of the networks each year to this day. It also applies to contracted talent; media reporter Ben Strauss revealed that NFL insider Jordan Schultz lost his contributor role with Colin Cowherd on FS1 in part over tipping draft picks last year.
Nevertheless, what Charania did was clearly in the scope of his job—and it also wasn’t anything new. His former mentor and rival, Adrian Wojnarowski, also used to similarly scoop the winner of the MVP award, including when Giannis Antetokounmpo won the honor in 2020.
Until the NBA exerts the same type of pressure that the NFL has over its rights partners to prevent this news from getting out through its reporters, it’s hard to imagine this trend changing.
