Blake Griffin dunks on Shams Charania for ruining NBA MVP announcement originally appeared on The Sporting News.
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The Amazon Prime Video NBA playoffs broadcast on Sunday night was supposed to announce the winner of the league MVP award.
ESPN’s Shams Charania spoiled it. He broke the news in a post on X on Sunday morning that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander had repeated as winner for the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Charania’s whole gig is based on breaking news before it is otherwise announced.
That doesn’t always extend to awards, but that’s what he did in this case.
Some fans speculated that he had actually scheduled the post but put a.m. on it instead of p.m., but there’s no way to know that for sure.
Charania did post a follow-up after the first SGA post, so it seems that was his plan all along.
He decided to ruin the thunder for one of the league’s broadcast partners, and the NBA probably wasn’t thrilled that the news broke in a single social media post early Sunday morning rather than in their primetime playoff broadcast.
With all that in mind, one of the members of the Prime pregame show wasn’t happy. Blake Griffin had a message for Charania.
“What are we doing man? It’s Sunday, Shams,” Griffin said on the Prime pregame show. “Go to brunch you nerd. C’mon.”
On one hand, Griffin has a bit of a point. There was no reason for Charania to break that news so early.
On the other hand, though, that’s Charania’s job. He gets paid to be a news breaker, and so he broke the news.
Yep, it ruined Prime’s moment. That’s not Charania’s concern, though.
Besides, maybe he went and had brunch after breaking the news.
