ESPN's Shams Charania Claps Back at Doc Rivers in New Video Over Comments on His Bucks Reporting

ESPN insider Shams Charania took a shot at the Milwaukee Bucks, more specifically their former coach, after their season ended on Sunday.

Appearing Monday on The Pat McAfee Show, Charania laid out what the offseason may look like for Milwaukee. He then aired some grievances.

"The reality of everything in Milwaukee is this, if they spent as much time dealing with their own internal dynamics and problems as they do responding to accurate reports, they wouldn't be in the mess that they're in right now," he said.

Charania also compared the Bucks to organizers of the ill-fated Fyre Festival in 2017.

"The part we're at now is when everyone wants to run and you're doing the cover-up," he said.

On April 7, Charania and colleague Jamal Collier published a lengthy report outlining the internal problems in Milwaukee. One portion centered on a March 1 team meeting in which Rivers challenged his players and suggested they should check his résumé.

Adding further detail to the scene, Charania reported Rivers copied Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti and told people in the room to "google me."

Rivers addressed that story days later on FanDuel's Run It Back. He said that "that was taken so out of context to what I was trying to say."

The veteran coach went on to question Charania's sourcing.

"I hate that 'allegedly' there were players who talked, and I think it was more agents who talked than players, but that's for another day," he said. "You know there's always one. When you have articles like this, you there's one guy talking, which is pretty obvious if you read the article who it is."

Rivers went on to claim Charania had been motivated to write a negative story about him and the Bucks.

The Athletic's Eric Nehm published a new postmortem for the 2025-26 Bucks on Monday, which echoes a lot of the themes from the ESPN story. One player told Nehm they "checked out on this season" when Rivers badly missed the mark with his messaging in a conversation after a March 21 shootaround.

Charania didn't really need to spike the football Monday.

The Bucks lost 50 games in a bitterly disappointing season and now face a ton of tough decisions. Rivers also resigned, and it may not be a stretch to say his Milwaukee tenure was so bad that he may not coach in the NBA again.

Charania is already coming out well ahead and we may not have even scratched the surface on the fallout from this year.