Last week, rumors spread that The Athletic’s Shams Charania, one of the preeminent NBA newsbreakers in the industry, ran the Twitter account @TheHoopCentral, which aggregates reports, highlights, and other NBA-related content. The suspicions circulated from these screenshots, which seemed to indicate Charania was sharing his own Instagram post via The Hoop Central’s page.
The owner of Hoop Central is Shams himself LMAOOO pic.twitter.com/QxFgTYZAVM
— Real NBA Quotez (@realnbaquotxz) November 24, 2022
On Wednesday, appearing on “The Pat McAfee Show,” Charania put those rumors to rest and clarified he is not the one behind The Hoop Central. Before answering genuinely, Charania sarcastically owned up to running The Hoop Central, saying among his responsibilities with The Athletic, Stadium, and FanDuel, he also runs a page sending out 500 tweets per day to more than one million followers.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or the juice,” said Charania, who was met with discontent from McAfee and others. “I’m sorry to all the listeners. Unfortunately, that isn’t me. But listen, shout out to that account. They do a good job, as far as when they aggregate information, they always check to make sure they’re that they’re aggregating it the right way. That’s really what happened that day. So, shout out to them.”
@ShamsCharania sets the record straight on whether he runs @TheHoopCentral as his “burner account”
pic.twitter.com/NM1qCgZC0k
— ClutchPoints (@ClutchPointsApp) November 30, 2022
“I appreciate everyone online who actually thinks I have the time,” he continued. “I feel like I just broke the hearts of everyone listening that thought I was running that account.”