Blake Griffin and Taylor Rooks Call Out Shams Charania as a ‘Nerd’ for Spoiling NBA MVP Reveal
Blake Griffin had thoughts. Shams Charania broke the MVP news ahead of the official Tuesday reveal that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander had won it, and Blake Griffin and Taylor Rooks turned around and ran him over on Amazon’s coverage. The word Griffin used was “nerd.”
The full quote is the kind of thing you wish more analysts would say on live television. Griffin pointed out that Shams ruins one of the only legitimate moments left in the NBA awards calendar. The MVP reveal used to be must-watch TV, partly because nobody actually knew until the broadcast confirmed it. Now the news leaks, the conversation moves on, and the trophy ceremony plays to a viewership of nobody.
Taylor Rooks backed him up. She called the situation what it is. The NBA spends real money building these awards shows. They get sponsors. They get prime-time slots. They get top players to show up and sit through hours of programming. And then a 30-year-old reporter takes a screenshot of a source’s text message and ends the show before it starts.
This is becoming a pattern. Shams broke last year’s MVP early too. He broke Rookie of the Year. He breaks coaching news during conference championships. He has built an entire career on being three minutes faster than anyone else, and the league has decided not to fight him on it.
The question is whether the NBA should care. There is a real argument that the league benefits from constant news. More content. More engagement. More reasons to refresh Twitter. Shams’s leaks keep the offseason interesting and the regular season buzzing.
There is also a real argument that big moments should stay big. The MVP reveal is supposed to be a moment. The player gets the call, the camera catches the reaction, the family loses it, the music plays. None of that happens when half the audience already knows the result before the show starts.
Griffin’s frustration is the same frustration anyone who actually watches the awards show has. The product is being undermined by a reporter who works for one of the NBA’s broadcast partners. ESPN pays Shams to break news. ESPN also pays for the rights to broadcast the same league he is breaking news on. The conflict is obvious.
The fix is simple but unlikely. The NBA could embargo MVP and other award results until the broadcast. They could threaten the reporters who leak with credential pulls. They could give the announcement to a player on the night of, with no advance notice. Other leagues handle this better. The NFL Draft has its issues with broken picks, but Roger Goodell still gets to actually read names on a stage to a watching public.
Adam Silver could do the same. He has not, and probably will not, because the leaks drive engagement and the league benefits from the noise.
What Griffin and Rooks did was point out that the cost of this kind of journalism is real. The product gets worse when there is no anticipation. The players get robbed of their moment. The fans get robbed of the reveal. The awards show becomes a recap show.
SGA winning his second straight MVP at age 27 is a big deal. The Thunder star averaged 32 points per game and led OKC to the No. 1 seed in the West for a third straight year. He deserves the trophy ceremony. He deserves the family in the front row. He deserves the chance to react in real time.
Instead, Shams put it on Twitter at 11 a.m. before lunch. Blake Griffin called him a nerd. Taylor Rooks agreed. The NBA shrugged. The cycle continues.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
