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Message: [QUOTE="MikeSU02, post: 4795290, member: 60"] Shams article (also a lot on Woj): [URL]https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/shams-charania-nba-insider-the-athletic-new-york-times-profile.html[/URL] One section of interest: [I]But many agents and executives said there were less obvious and more private reasons to work with Charania or Wojnarowski. They can give you as much as you give them. “Woj made me a better agent,” Warren LeGarie, a longtime agent who represents coaches, told me. “If I was trying to get in on something, he would tell me, ‘You’re wasting your time, that deal is done.’” Another agent told me that if he needed to know, say, how many open roster spots a team had to see if he could land a job for one of his players, he could text Charania, who would find out and get back to him. Teams can also use insiders as middlemen: If one GM wants to trade a player while maintaining deniability about their desire to do so, they might let one of the reporters leak it quietly around the league. “They become like Henry Kissinger — Nixon can’t get on the phone with Brezhnev, but Shams or Woj can,” the longtime front-office executive said. “They can be used to facilitate a conversation that is beyond salvation. It’s like having a marriage counselor.” Every reporter navigates a gray area with sources, but the relationships Charania and Wojnarowski have appear especially cozy. “The thing that changed is they became double agents,” John Skipper, the former ESPN president, told me. “They call people and say, ‘Tell me what you’re up to,’ and the quid pro quo is, ‘I’ll tell you a little something I’ve heard.’ You’re suddenly on the road to being part of causation if somebody acts upon something you share.” The longtime front-office executive told me that information from insider reporters could even help a GM save a buck. “Woj or Shams might say, ‘Hey, don’t get levered up on Player X; he’s not gonna get an offer from his team,’” the executive said. “There are times when they have information that has prevented me from making a mistake in terms of the magnitude of a contract offer or the inclusion of a specific asset in a deal.”[/I] [/QUOTE]

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