Everyone might miss Woj, but Shams is Mark Cuban’s guy.
The former principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks went on Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast and boldly declared that he would never invest in media, but he has invested in ESPN’s foremost NBA insider. In discussing trades that never happened, including deals that would’ve sent Kobe Bryant and Paul Pierce — on separate occasions — to the Mavericks, Cuban peeled back the layers on how trades get leaked.
Obviously, we are well aware of how these trades get leaked. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out, but we rarely hear about these dynamics from an ownership perspective. Cuban was one of the most transparent owners in modern NBA history, and he didn’t disappoint here.
“Shams was my guy.”@mcuban tells @maxwelltani about the NBA trades he missed out on, getting intel from reporters, and how news leaks around the league: pic.twitter.com/pH2hncxthP
— Semafor (@semafor) August 19, 2025
“I thought we had traded for Kobe, and their general manager talked them out of it,” said Cuban. “You know, a bunch of free agents that we thought we had, but didn’t happen. That’s just the nature of the beast. If you own a team long enough, you realize 99 percent of the trades you think you have done don’t get done. We may have had a trade for Paul Pierce. It was done. And then you have to do this thing called a trade call, and it involved a third team. And the third team didn’t know the details of the trade. And they said, ‘Well, if we’re going to approve this, you have to give us another first-round pick.’ And we couldn’t do it. And so, that Paul Pierce trade got killed.”
So when do these almost-deals start making their way to reporters? Cuban explained that it usually happens when talks expand beyond just front offices.
“When you talk to the agents or the players, yeah, because the agents have their interests. The players have their interests,” Cuban continued. “That’s when it really starts to leak out.”
That’s when you get calls from the Adrian Wojnarowskis and the Shams Charanias of the world.
“On my end, it was Shams,” added Cuban. “Shams was my guy. He would know. I would tell him, ‘I can’t give you details, but I’ll give you something else at some point in the future.’ But the flip side of it was, he would help educate me about other things happening around the league. So, we had a great relationship. He knew when not to ask, and I knew when not to ask about other teams because he wouldn’t tell me. But there was certain things he would tell me as it related to players and what their interests were.
“He was big help with us getting Kyrie [Irving], when we traded for Kyrie. And for us extending him when we extended, because he had a great relationship with Kyrie’s agent (Shetellia Riley Irving, his stepmother).”
That just goes to show how these reporter-executive relationships actually work in practice. It’s not a secret conspiracy, but rather a business built on mutual benefit.
Cuban needed information about players and their interests; Shams needed access and scoops. Both sides got what they needed, and Cuban was transparent enough to explain how it all worked. The relationship helped facilitate the Kyrie Irving trade, which worked out for everyone involved. That’s just how the NBA information economy operates. And it’s why only a select few break transactions, because you need Cuban’s relationship with Shams to get that kind of information.