To understand where the Dallas Mavericks were and where they might be headed, you need to understand owner Mark Cuban. Both.
“There are two Mark Cubans,” says a Western Conference executive. “There is Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and there is Mark Cuban, the brand. The reality is that the brand is better than the owner.”
The owner can never capture the brand at this point, but the potentially good news for Mavs fans is that the Cuban owner seems to have tried. We would like to thank Luka Doncic, the sensational second year Mavs tip who took on the role of franchise superstar after being held for 21 seasons by Dirk Nowitzki.
“He has played this game before,” says Doncic’s agent, Bill Duffy, of Cuban’s willingness to bear the costs of building a title contender. “He will download his wallet when he knows he has the right pieces. He is renting. He wanted to buy but he waited. And when he buys, he will buy large.”
The Cuban actually introduced the idea of NBA owners by doing much more than just writing checks. He became the first to speak publicly about the moves he wanted to make and the players he hoped to acquire, essentially playing basketball in the league in real time with a real team. While Donnie Nelson is the general manager of the Mavs – and has been since 2005 – he is rarely in front of the cameras, and both rival GMs and players’ agents say they talk to Cubans when they discuss business.
“Mark has changed the look of an NBA owner,” says an GM from the Eastern Conference. “He was the first owner to share the visibility of the property in celebrities. Before entering the league, you didn’t know who the owners were. They hired their basketball players, sat down and let them work. They were not in the room I draw, go to training and be interviewed all the time. The owners are practical now. “
But with Nowitzki’s aging, so apparently, Cuban enthusiasm spared no expense to win another ring. The owner who immediately took a dip by equipping each player’s locker with a personal flat screen, sound system and plush bathrobe, as well as dropping $ 46 million on a new team plane that included a weight room, is become frugal. The player’s perks never stopped – Cuban updated the locker room again in 2017 – but in the past eight years, the Mavs players’ payroll has been in the bottom third of the league five times, including deaths the last two years ago. Their payroll did not come close to the rankings as in the 2010-11 championship season, when the MAVs were third behind only the Los Angeles Lakers and Orlando Magic.
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“What Mark is good at is being first,” says the executive. “He was the first on Twitter to say that he would pay his employees during the [coronavirus] shutdown. Many owners paid their employees more than he did, but every time someone announced that they were doing it, the story referred to Mark because he was the first to do it. “
Recently, MAVs have also received positive reviews. After three consecutive seasons at the bottom of the Western Conference, they made up a list of dynamic young and proven veterans who produced the fourth best winning percentage of the franchise (.597) in the last decade, starting from the close. The transformation started with a little luck. In 2018, they targeted Doncic, but taking him into the draft in their fifth slot for the overall draft required several other teams who should have been acutely aware of his potential to look elsewhere. The Phoenix Suns had # 1 choice and a coach, Igor Kokoskov, who had been head coach of the Slovenian national team led by Doncic. The Sacramento Kings had the second absolute choice and are managed by GM Vlade Divac and the assistant GM Peja Stojakovic, both NBA stars developed from Eastern Europe with wide international ties.
Mark Cuban appears to have recovered as owner in Dallas after the team swapped Luka Doncic during the 2018 draft.Richard W. Rodriguez / Associated Press / Associated Press / Associated Press
The Atlanta Hawks, in desperate need of a breadwinner, actually took Doncic with the third pick, only to throw him at the Mavs for number 5 Trae Young and another protected pick in the first round.
“Mark has fallen backwards into Doncic,” says the executive. “But he is really comfortable with international players. He traded [Kristaps] Porzingis. It involved him again. He’s calling to rebuild the register. “
Make no mistake, the executive admires the Cuban, both for being a progressive voice in the NBA and without fear of saying his mind on topics outside the realm of the league. It’s just that Cuban The Owner, as the executive sees it, spent its first 11 years after buying the Mavericks by creating Cuban The Brand of really doing everything possible to win a championship. Ever since they did it in 2011, the Mavericks have not come close to winning another, making the playoffs four times in the next eight seasons and never leaving the first round. “Mark won his championship and then took the next eight years,” says the manager.
Cuban The Brand has been much more aggressive and probably more accomplished. His ownership of the Mavs is now relegated to the second line of his Wikipedia biography, preceded by him identified as an “American businessman, television personality, media owner and investor”. His Twitter biography doesn’t mention his Maverick property at all.
Maybe for good reason. He has appeared as himself in four films for the big screen in the past five years. He is universally known for his role as an angel investor in the ABC reality show, “Shark Tank”. Since 2012 he has appeared 19 times as himself in various TV shows. For the past five years he has contemplated running for the President of the United States. Although he has spared with the current president, Donald Trump, for years, has been invited to join a presidential advisory committee to help restart the pandemic-weakened economy. He offered to help small businesses secure loans from the Federal Personnel Protection Plan.
“I didn’t like him but I learned to respect him,” says an Eastern Conference scout.
“I love the fact that he is outspoken,” adds a chair of the Eastern Conference team. “Not all owners can be the same. He’s the one who has the personality to do it. I think he’s a genuine guy who carries his emotions on his sleeve. In the circle of ownership they all keep away from anything controversial, but he’s not afraid of go out “.
The fact that the Cuban emerged as a leader of thought is very different from what was thought of as owner only two years ago, someone seriously unaware and potentially misogynistic. In February 2018, Sports Illustrated he wrote an in-depth investigative piece that detailed rampant misogyny, sexual harassment and predatory behavior within the team’s offices that had lasted for decades, in addition to a domestic assault by a staff member.
Cuban, who did not respond to an interview request, was not mentioned as an author, but had to explain how a practical owner might be unaware of such behavior that has been taking place for so long within his organization.
“I was involved in basketball operations, but other than getting financial data and reports, I wasn’t involved in everyday life [of the business side] at all, “he said IS. “That’s why I just put it off. I let people do their jobs. And if there was something like that I would have been informed, obviously I wasn’t.”
A former employee named Melissa Weishaupt replied IS shortly afterwards he didn’t buy his reasoning, writing: “You own 100% of the team, Mark. The dollar stops with you.”
The Cuban responded to the controversy hire a former AT&T HR officer, Cynthia Marshall, as its new CEO and create new positions by overseeing ethics, compliance, diversity and inclusion. He instructed investigators to interview over 200 employees and examine 1.6 million documents, resulting in a 43-page report and several layoffs. When the report was published that September, the NBA announced that the Cuban had agreed to donate $ 10 million to women’s leadership programs and domestic violence groups, exceeding the $ 2.5 million limit that the NBA could have fined him. (The NBA also ordered the Mavericks to submit quarterly reports on efforts to hire more female executives and set up an employee system to report illegal behavior.)
Although the Mavericks have not yet won a playoff series since 2011, Cuban has managed to become a brand in its own right.Gets the images / Getty Images
“He’s an intelligent boy,” says Duffy. “He reacted immediately, faced and repaired.” For its part, Cuban told Rachel Nichols of ESPN: “I was deaf. And I have no excuse. I should have known better or I could have done better. I learned. There is no other way to say it. “
The Western Conference executive hopes that Cuban’s re-engagement with his team will also inspire him to re-engage in shaping the championship. Cuban spent much of his first decade as owner complaining publicly and abrasively of the various issues he had with the way the league operated, resulting in over $ 1 million in fines collected by then Commissioner David Stern.
“It has matured,” says the team chair of the Eastern Conference.
The challenges the league will face to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, says the executive of the Western Conference, will require the kind of progressive Cuban thinking.
“He fought for change and innovation,” says the executive. “But the championship makes you beat halfway. Now is the time when we need more leadership, and he is the ideal guy as someone who can connect with the old guard but is a forward-looking innovator. The championship is fantastic in understanding how to perform ideas, but they need someone to develop them. The big question is: has Mark been shot down too much to generate the momentum needed or can he catch a second wind? “
Or maybe a third party, considering that Mark Cuban The Brand is not going anywhere and Mark Cuban The Owner has resurfaced. Is there room for Mark Cuban The League Savior?
“Mark has all the intellectual and physical energy of anyone he knows,” says Duffy.
Like any otherone. The challenge of recovering from this season would require anybody’s energy three. At this rate, the Cuban will need a dressing room all to himself. All three.
Ric Bucher covers the NBA for the Bleacher report. Follow him on Twitter, @RicBucher.
Bucher hosts the podcast Bucher & Friends with NFL veteran Will Blackmon and former NBA center Ryan Hollins, available on iTunes.
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