Shams Charania: ‘Five to Seven Minutes Went By’ Between Hearing About Luka Dončić Trade to Putting it Out

As the NBA trading deadline approached last month, there were significant transactions that took place around the league involving various star players. Yet what may have been the most monumental trade of the year took place shortly before time expired when superstar guard and five-time NBA All-Star selection Luka Dončić was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers in a three-team deal that sent Anthony Davis, Max Christie and others back to the Dallas Mavericks. Shams Charania, who is in his first year as a senior NBA insider at ESPN, broke news of the trade on social media and recalled the experience during a recent appearance on The Young Man and The Three podcast.

Charania recalled that the Lakers had just defeated the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden and that he was preparing to take a flight to Bristol, Conn. ahead of the trading deadline. At about 11:05 p.m. that night, he received a tip that something was taking place between the Lakers and Mavericks. Charania had heard a few days earlier that the teams were talking about a trade surrounding a player who was ultimately not part of the deal, and he deemed after digging for more information that nothing was going on there.

“Going into the trade deadline, for me, what I don’t like to track is dead ends,” Charania explained. “Waste of time – yeah, I don’t want to waste my time. I want to just track the things that I really have to put my mind to, so I felt like that was a dead end.”

Although Charania originally thought that this tip related to what he had previously heard, he began to hear more information and checked in with sources to glean parts of the deal. While checking in with the second and third sources, he learned that James Hood-Schifino was heading to the Utah Jazz and that Markieff Morris was going to join the Lakers. Charania struggled to comprehend exactly what the trade was and later learned that Dončić and Davis were on the move as well.

“By the time I got to the fourth and fifth person, I got all the details of the trade, made one more call, and I didn’t even say on that call,” Charania explained. “I basically was like, ‘Is this f*****g real?,’ and the person was like, ‘Yeah, yeah it’s real,’ and obviously my hands were shaking. You have to make sure every detail was right, you had to make sure there was no typo, and I just remember my hands were trembling.”

Charania acknowledged that due to the sudden nature of learning about and confirming the trade, he did not have a graphic ready to post. In fact, he articulated the timeline having been five to seven minutes in hearing about the deal, getting five confirmed sources on the move and disseminating it on social media. Charania’s phone promptly began to receive many text messages asking if he had been hacked, but he did not have time to get back to everyone as he gathered more information about the deal.

“I got so many crazy text messages, and I responded to like five people on calls,” Charania said. “One was a SportsCenter late-night producer, Tom DeCorte, because he called me like three times, and I saw his third one because it was like back to back to back calls. By the third call, I’m like, ‘Oh sh*t, I should probably pick up his call because he’s probably wondering, ‘Is this real for us to talk about on the air?,’ so I picked up his call.”

Brooklyn Nets forward Cameron Johnson joined the podcast as well and remembered how the team found out about the deal after a game while traveling. Johnson explained how people on the Nets were going to social media and that there was an initial belief that he got hacked. Rather than trying to process the ramifications of the deal himself, Charania conveyed that he was in “go mode” in trying to gather more details and prepare himself to appear on ESPN to discuss the deal.

“It wasn’t until like the next day when I was on the flight to Bristol – I moved my flight from the morning flight to an afternoon flight – that I was reading all the comments and I was reading all the reaction,” Charania explained.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, wow,’ because I remember – I look back on my first ESPN that I did at whatever it was, like almost midnight my time, and I said, ‘This is one of the biggest trades in recent history in the NBA,’ and I was looking at the reaction. I’m like, ‘This is the biggest trade in recent history.’ I don’t know why I said, ‘One of’ – I think I was still trying to process in the moment.”

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