The biggest story of the NBA offseason is the federal investigation into former Pistons guard Malik Beasley over some suspicious gambling activity around prop bets on his own statistical output. Beasley is at least the third player, along with Jontay Porter and Terry Rozier, to draw scrutiny from the authorities; while Porter, who was ass, got banned for life, the other two investigations, into the two more useful players, are still ongoing. You would not know this if you had only followed the story through updates from Shams Charania.
ESPN's dutiful stenographer and avant garde language artist was one of the first people to break news of the Beasley investigation two months ago, and last Friday, he offered what looked like a promising final update to the story: Beasley was no longer the target of the federal investigation. That made it sound like Beasley had been cleared; Charania's ESPN story on the matter included a handful of quotes from Beasley's lawyers assuring the public that they'd "received determination on Beasley not being considered the target" and largely focusing on how good Beasley was for the Pistons last year.
However, as usual, Charania's commitment to the copy and paste functions left his report short on a few load-bearing details. The feds ruling that Beasley was no longer the "target" of their investigation does not mean he was exonerated. As Awful Announcing noted, other reporters covering the story got the same press release from Beasley's attorneys, though unlike Charania, those reporters are not in the PR business, so they framed the news accurately: Beasley is no longer the target of the investigation, but he is still one of its subjects.
That detail comes courtesy of Front Office Sports' Alex Schiffer. The Detroit Free Press's Robert Snell and Coty Davis, who also had the scoop on the investigation months ago, spoke to Beasley's lawyer and got him to admit that he still has "no idea" whether Beasley will be charged with a crime.
This is not even the first time ESPN's star reporter has duffed an update on an Eastern Conference guard's gambling-related whoopsies this very offseason. Two months ago, he joined Pat McAfee's ESPN show, where he reported that the Rozier investigation was over. "Terry Rozier as of right now has been cleared," he said. "There's nothing really active right now."
It turns out that Charania was correct only in the narrowest and least relevant sense: Rozier was cleared in an independent NBA investigation of his case. He is still part of the federal investigation, which is obviously more significant. More great work from the network eagerly transforming itself into a gambling company that happens to broadcast sports.
It should not be surprising that Charania would mishandle these sorts of updates. In the NBA ecosystem, he serves as a semi-official mouthpiece for agents and league apparatchiks to disseminate favorable news about their clients through a reporter whose reach is matched only by his credulity. He is a perfectly transparent surface through which any motivated party can pass any piece of news, confident that he will neither scrutinize nor interrogate. When the news is something as banal as the lesser McDaniels brother signing with the Western Conference's second-stupidest team, this is annoying but largely inconsequential. When the story actually matters, it looks a lot more like active deception.
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