The drama surrounding Shams Charania’s report that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander won this year’s NBA MVP award illustrated the differences between how the NFL and NBA deal with reporters at their broadcast rights partners.
Charania—whose job is to break news—scooped the announcement that the league office had been planning to reveal Gilgeous-Alexander had won MVP during Amazon’s pregame show before Game 7 of Cavaliers-Pistons on Sunday. The Prime Video studio crew chided Charania for stepping on its “exclusive,” with Blake Griffin joking Charania should have been doing something else, like going to brunch, on a Sunday morning.
That such a conflict even occurred demonstrates the differences between the NBA and NFL media spaces. This, frankly, never would have happened with a reporter at an NFL league rights partner. The idea of Ian Rapoport or Adam Schefter breaking the news of an award winner before the NFL Honors ceremony—which in the past has been simulcast on NFL Network and the Super Bowl broadcaster that year, and is migrating to Netflix next year—is borderline unfathomable.
In 2015, the league office sent a letter to the heads of all the networks who were rights partners at the time effectively decreeing that their reporters would not tip NFL Draft picks.
