Charania drinks only two cups a day but exudes caffeination his legs shook constantly under the table, and I lost track of how often he reached for his phone, which had 125 unheard voice-mails, 72,443 unread emails, and an unceasing stream of texts, many of which he responded to as they came in. At the restaurant, he wore all black - suede jacket with a hood, sweatshirt, skinny pants - and a pair of John Geiger sneakers that were white save for what appeared to be a coffee stain. “If I take a day off, never mind a week off, I put myself behind the eight ball,” Charania said. ![]() It was mid-September, a rare slow moment in the NBA calendar, but Charania was keeping tabs on a pair of extended dramas involving two star players, Damian Lillard and James Harden, who were both demanding to be traded by their respective teams. ![]() “I didn’t even realize I was doing that,” he said when I pointed it out. At one point, Charania set down a piece of toast to type out a text with his right pinkie to avoid smearing the screen with the strawberry jam on his thumb. When we met, Charania had taken a Lyft from his home in the Chicago suburbs because driving would have prevented him from texting and the train wasn’t an appropriate place to take a call from, say, the general manager of an NBA team whose name popped up on Charania’s iPhone shortly after he sat down. The job involves staying in near-constant contact with hundreds of agents, executives, players, and hangers-on throughout the NBA in order to be in position to break basketball news big and small to his 2.1 million followers on X (the former Twitter) - more than any other reporter at the Times. Charania works for The Athletic, the sports website that is now business-critical to the future of the New York Times and where his title is senior NBA insider. “It’s very hard to have lunch with Shams,” a former NBA executive had warned me. Shams Charania arrived at a restaurant in downtown Chicago last month just as his colleagues and sources around the National Basketball Association told me he would: running a bit late, phone in hand, AirPods plugged into both ears.
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