Star NBA insider Shams Charania a looming free agent

Now that NBA free agency has mostly wound down, it is time for one of the league’s top insiders to hit the market.

Shams Charania’s deals with The Athletic — now under the New York Times umbrella — Stadium and FanDuel are all up in the next month or two, sources told The Post.

Charania, who just turned 30 in April, is one of the elite news-breakers in sports.

The job as one of the top league insiders has been significant in sports media for decades, dating back to newspaper titans like Peter Vecsey, Will McDonough, Chris Mortensen and Peter Gammons, who made their way to TV.

In the age of social media, the top insiders are engagement factories — Charania has over three million combined followers on X and Instagram.

It is good timing for Charania to be coming up for new deals, as there are more theoretical potential suitors than there were two years ago when he was last a free agent.

The NBA is reportedly on the cusp of finalizing new TV deals with NBC and Amazon, an occasion that basketball reporters, broadcasters and production staffers have been salivating about for years as both networks would need to staff up from scratch.

In 2022, Charania re-signed with Stadium and The Athletic, and added his third gig with FanDuel.

Charania’s reporting delves beyond the “what” and includes the “why”.

One example was this past January when Charania and Jovan Buha co-authored a story describing a “deepening disconnect between Darvin Ham and the Lakers locker room”.

The article described myriad specific frustrations amongst Lakers players with lineup changes by Ham, and was a foreshadowing of the coach getting fired by the team after failing to make it out of the NBA Play-In Tournament.

Charania declined to comment to The Post about his current free agency.