Shams Charania started digging around the Trump administration out of boredom

Shams Charania isn’t ready to trade the NBA for politics, but he has already built some contacts after digging around the Trump administration.

Charania was featured in this week’s episode of Jimmy Traina’s SI Media podcast. And during the interview, Traina asked Charania about previously breaking pick selections during the 2020 and 2023 NFL Drafts.

“I would just say there were some sources that overlapped. That summer was interesting because I picked up a lot of contacts in different realms,” Charania explained, referring to 2020 when sports leagues were shuttered by COVID. “I was really bored at different points because my whole life is structured around games and covering the league and everything.”

And without sports to cover or news to break in 2020, Charania had to find other ways to keep his insider juices flowing, which is why he briefly started digging into the political realm.

“At that point, Donald Trump came up with the ‘return to sports’ committee and there was a bunch of people on that committee from all of these different sporting lanes. Robert Kraft, Mark Cuban, etc. I remember digging in on the meetings that were taking place with the return to sports under Trump’s watch. I picked up some political contacts during that.”

Jordan Schultz previously attempted to be an insider for both the NFL and the NBA simultaneously. Ian Rapoport once told the Awful Announcing Podcast he could pivot from being an NFL insider to the NBA or another sport. And ESPN even previously considered making Jeff Passan their lead NBA insider before ultimately hiring Charania as their successor to Adrian Wojnarowski. But going from the NBA to politics is a different sort of insider leap.

Imagine a world where Stephen A. Smith could be president of the United States and Shams Charania is there as a White House correspondent. Despite picking up some political contacts out of boredom, Charania insisted he has no interest in covering anything other than the NBA.

“I stick to what I know and what I feel like I’m truly passionate about,” Charania told Traina. “That’s always my inkling, I can’t ever do something I’m not fully committed in…NBA only.”