It was an eventful year for our award's namesake. Shams Charania's mentor-turned-rival Adrian Wojnarowski left ESPN in September to take a job in college basketball. Just three weeks later, Charania left The Athletic and assumed Woj's place as "Senior NBA Insider." This was perhaps always his destiny, since he was a news-breaking teenage prodigy: to speak his beautiful sentences on linear TV, to appear in a little photo inset for news graphics. In November, Charania was granted an award for basketball writing besides ours: first place in the Professional Basketball Writers Association's 2024 Blumenthal Memorial Writing Contest, for his co-bylined work with The Athletic's Jon Krawczynski. If any of the other awardees are reading this post, please reach out: We're curious to know what it's like to learn that you have won an award for good writing, and then, within the same sentence, learn that Shams Charania has also won it.
It is momentous to present the Shamsy in this strange year of "artificial intelligence." Sometimes critics compare the scoopster prose style to the output of a large language model; I find this funny, but off the mark. While often factually wrong and semantically hollow, an LLM's sentences typically scan like sentences that real humans might produce. Perhaps lazy or thoughtless humans trying to cheat on their homework, but real ones. These models are, after all, trained on a huge corpus of human writing. But the compositions of Shamsy award winners are compelling precisely because they deviate from default human rhythms. Man has not yet devised an intelligence that can report a Jarred Vanderbilt injury in such a disorienting fashion. For now, the human mind is more flavorfully stupid than its technological successors. That's what makes these nominees some of the most innovative writers working today, and that's why we're grateful to sift through these submissions.
Thanks as always to readers who sent us bad sentences over the course of the year. Defector's panel of judges discussed a range of submissions during a pair of mid-year and year-end nominee streams, and have narrowed it down to the finalists below:
Shams Charania of ESPN, detailing a new kind of experience:
Lakers forward Jarred Vanderbilt has recently experienced fluid in his left knee during his rehabilitation from offseason procedures to both feet and is targeting early January for his return, the Lakers told ESPN on Tuesday.
Kyle Griffin of MSNBC, on the comportment of Donald Trump at the end of his election corruption trial:
CNN, on the comportment of Donald Trump at the end of his hush-money trial:
Ben Standig and Dianna Russini of The Athletic, on the Commanders' search for a head coach:
When pundits and internet rumors flooded the zone for weeks with claims that [Ben] Johnson, 37, was the overwhelming favorite, if not a “lock” hire in Washington — a downside of Harris running a largely leak-free search — minimal pushback occurred. The gleefully ignorant voices were unaware or chose not to care that the consummation assumptions came from an echo chamber of gossip rather than factual information.
Another main view centered on reports that Johnson’s camp brought with them hefty compensation demands for the second-year coordinator who schemed Detroit’s offense into the elite category. League sources putting their chips in this bucket cite the agent, Richmond Flowers, as hoping to void Johnson’s head-coaching apprehension with a Godfather offer he couldn’t refuse.
He is considered a coach who prefers holing up in his office, coming up with game plans and playing with mad scientist vibes rather than leading a locker room.
Michael Voepel of ESPN, with a representative sample of the year's brilliant commentary on Caitlin Clark:
The magnifying glass on her is enormous, but the actual performances examined through the prism of reality have been the overall positive mixed bag almost any top rookie has early on in a pro sports career.
Sam Cosentino of Sportsnet, on a beguiling NHL prospect (h/t @failsonmcdonald):
Some of his identity as an underaged player has been forgotten and replaced by noticing his super slick hands and creativity. His continuous growth hasn’t impacted his ability to handle the puck with pace.
Anthony Slater of The Athletic, watching a divorce path splinter and sprout:
It’s been a layered five-year path to this divorce, splintering last season, sprouting earlier and finalizing in the last couple weeks, where —among the conversations [Klay] Thompson had, league sources said — was a request of Stephen Curry not to exert his significant organizational influence and up the temperature with management to ensure Thompson’s return.
Shams Charania (then) of The Athletic, telling us what Rudy Gobert had:
Andrew Marchand of The Athletic, on a bizarre start to a metaphorical basketball game:
That is why Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s diss track from 2022 is underpinning the sudden jump ball between Zaslav’s TNT Sports and NBC for the last NBA TV rights deal that is still up for grabs. Two years ago, Zaslav dunked on NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s league.
Josina Anderson, enlightening us on discussions of awareness, and then advancing her report on the hot coordinator:
Scoop Jackson of the Chicago Sun-Times, in a piece that uses a Dan Orlovsky quote as an epigraph and only gets headier from there:
The trade market on Justin Fields dried faster than coaching jobs did for Bill Belichick. Making anything that general manager Ryan Poles and the Bears primitively had in mind with moving him and getting equitable market share in return as impossible as Jimmy Kimmel getting through the Oscars without mentioning Donald Trump.
[...]
In a week when Poles acquired three Pro Bowl players at three needed positions[...], the disappearing act of the league’s need and interest in Fields had to be an ‘‘Oh, ----, what just happened?’’ awakening.
[...]
But this became an “is-what-it-is” saga staring down the barrel of an ever-shifting landscape that was just waiting to find its way to Halas’ halls in any conversation concerning Fields’ immediate future outside of Chicago.
Shams Charania (then) of Stadium, giving us news of a kind we've never seen:
Logan Murdock of The Ringer, with a unique style of dangling:
League sources believe Andrew Wiggins, who struggled to find a consistent role last season, will be aggressively dangled in trade talks.
Camila DeChalus and Betsy Klein of CNN, writing about Biden pet strategy:
That incident caused a breach in trust, a source familiar with the dynamic said, which continued as the president’s top protectors worked to avoid a second dog.
Shams Charania (then) of The Athletic, explaining an NBA fight with his usual flair:
Both Stewart and Eubanks were going chest-to-chest before a swing to Eubanks' face connected on Wednesday, sources said. Both were separated and there is police presence involved with the situation in Phoenix tonight.
According to those sources, both Stewart and Eubanks were going chest-to-chest before a swing to Eubanks’ lip area connected. [has since been edited out of the story]
Josina Anderson, with a since-deleted riddle on the status of Haason Reddick:
Our colleague Luis Paez-Pumar made an accurate observation as we reviewed the submissions: Josina Anderson is "the Messi of the Shamsys, where you have to really convince yourself she shouldn't win every year." Anderson, the 2023 Shamsy winner, continued to experiment this year, somehow putting chatty NFL coverage in conversation with the Language poets. There's so much to celebrate: her ability to place a comma where no other writer would think to place one; her unerring way of almost writing a lucid clause, then tossing in some totally inert flotsam at the last second; her exotic capitalization; and the Andersonian model of time. Nobody else whose job is to communicate information clearly is choosing to communicate in quite this way.
But our panel left a long deliberative session with another writer's words still echoing in the caverns of our freshly hollowed-out skulls. An old master had found a new style. In the past, Shams Charania has stunned us with overstuffed and unwieldy sentences, but this year he stood out for the hyper-efficient and compressed weirdness of his phrases: "had birth of his first child," "experienced fluid," "true overall genuineness." And he produced another two-word phrase so poignant and bracing that Defector leadership has considered changing the site's own tagline to "Unique News." Like a novelist turning mid-career to the haiku, Charania has proven that he can work beautifully in miniature. Woj might have ramped down to a different career opportunity in basketball, but ESPN has kept his legacy alive by hiring a generational talent in the field of language contortion.
Congratulations to Shams Charania on the 2024 Shamsy for his "unique news"; he is the first writer to win the award twice. Nominations for the 2025 Shamsy can be sent to tips@defector.com as they emerge.
