THE CUBAN TANKING CRISIS AND THE NBA’S COMPETITIVE INTEGRITY MESS
A league cheapened by load management and superstar entitlement now has a Dallas quitting conspiracy, prompting a question: What happened to the owner of the people and his never-compromise vows?
Once, he was considered the one sports owner who’d never surrender, the refreshing courtside superfan who equated failure to death and always would try his damndest to win. Once, Mark Cuban was so popular in America and respected as a billionaire entrepreneur that he became a mainstay on TV’s “Shark Tank,” approving and rejecting start-up proposals with a smile.
Now, he’s just another tanking shark.
The NBA’s competitive integrity problem has taken another corrupt turn into the gutter. Already diluted and cheapened by team-controlled load management, random trade demands and other forms of superstar entitlement, the league now faces a C-suite compromise: the Cuban Tanking Crisis.
Rather than send the proper message about winning — the one preached to young men and women in their formative years — Cuban lost a game on purpose Friday night by benching Kyrie Irving and four role players while using superstar Luka Doncic only 13 minutes. The defeat allowed the Dallas Mavericks to miss the playoffs and retain their 2023 first-round draft pick, which they otherwise would have sent to the New York Knicks. This bit of naked chicanery enables an opportunity — albeit slight — for the Mavs to land basketball’s next great force, 7-3 French phenom Victor Wembanyama, in the upcoming lottery.
The franchise has been in a tanking mode since it became obvious that Cuban’s foolhardy experiment had gone terribly wrong — thinking Doncic would thrive after a deadline trade for Irving, who only sabotages superstar tandem dreams. The loss to the undermanned Chicago Bulls meant Cuban’s scheme has come to fruition. But what about the capacity crowd of 20,313 customers who bought tickets in American Airlines Center? Maybe they’d hoped the Mavs would beat the Bulls, who had secured the final play-in berth in the Eastern Conference and were resting their top players, and confront a Sunday scenario where a victory over lowly San Antonio and an Oklahoma City loss to Memphis would lock in the final Western Conference play-in spot. What does the renowned man of the people, the owner who vowed never to cut corners, tell the fans now?
How about this: They’re all getting refunds for their tickets, their parking, their food, their beer, their merchandise … and their valuable time and energy? Yeah, sure. Because Cuban has been down this dirty back road before — publicly admitting his team was tanking in 2018, and didn’t care much when commissioner Adam Silver fined him $600,000 — an even larger fine won’t faze him. He’ll pay any amount to maneuver as he pleases, no matter how sleazy the means.
Never mind that Doncic already had condemned tanking, saying Tuesday, “When there’s still a chance, I’m gonna play. So that’s not gonna happen yet.” Never mind that he refused to meet with the media after the loss, a statement as blaring as any words.
And never mind that coach Jason Kidd, who said he wasn’t included in the white-flag decision by Cuban and general manager Nico Harrison, had difficulty breathing through the stench. “We were fighting for our lives, and understanding this is a situation we’re in, but the organization has made the decision to change. We all said that we want to have the opportunity to find a way to get in. And we were gonna play until told otherwise,” Kidd said before the game. “And today is the day that we’ve been told that we’re gonna do something different.”
Does he agree with quitting on the final weekend?
“Those are my bosses. So yes,” said Kidd, knowing a confrontation would cost him his job when his employment is entering shaky territory.
It was hard not to laugh when Kidd said the available players would “put our best foot forward” and “go out and try to play to win.” Then, he actually added, “You gotta be pros. You can’t cheat the game.”
Even though the owner was doing just that. He deserves to be stripped of that No. 1 pick by Silver, who no longer can merely sit there and allow tanking to fester through the league.
I’m not sure what happened to Cuban, the transformative cool kId of the early 2000s, but maybe he grew old and stale. A dozen seasons have passed since the Mavericks won their only NBA championship, and his desperation to contend with Doncic is turning to madness. As each squandered year passes, the likelihood increases that the Europhenom joins the toxic trade-demand fraternity before his free agency arrives in 2026. Cuban’s recent struggles began when he couldn’t retain Jalen Brunson, who has achieved predictable stardom after signing a four-year, $104 million deal with the Knicks. He picked a public fight with Brunson’s parents this week, saying, “It was only the parents that were the issue. Even the agent said, worst case, we can do a sign-and-trade. There’s just no possible way that it was about money.”
Did Brunson’s father, former NBA player Rick, convince his son to defect after Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau offered the elder Brunson an assistant coaching position? It’s neither here nor there if Cuban undercut the veteran guard with a lowball offer, as suggested by Brunson’s ex-Villanova teammate, Kris Jenkins. “Man the lies … you refused to offer him the contract he asked you … multiple times this is sick behavior Mark,” Jenkins tweeted.
Knowing Doncic missed Brunson — “a lot,” he said the other day — Cuban was pressured to take drastic measures. He traded for Irving, the franchise killer, ignoring the backlash after he promoted an antisemitic film on social media. Cuban happens to be Jewish. The Mavs are 8-17 since the Irving deal, and while he has played spectacularly at times, he only has impeded Doncic’s progress — continuing a corrosive pattern that included his divorce from LeBron James in Cleveland, his failure to meld with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown in Boston and the implosion in Brooklyn that led to the departures of Irving, Kevin Durant and, earlier, James Harden. Defense is why the Mavericks crashed, not surprising when Doncic is an offense-predominant player with conditioning/weight issues while Irving often views defense no more fondly than the coronavirus vaccine. The two aren’t compatible.
“They’re missing a leader out there,” said Tim Hardaway Sr., father of the Dallas guard, yet another NBA father immersed in the drama. “Luka is not a leader. Kyrie is not a leader. (For) me personally, that trade wasn’t for them. I think I would have kept what I had because I was in the fourth or fifth spot (in the West). What is not broken doesn’t need to be fixed.”
Marky Mark broke it anyway. With little evidence that Irving and Doncic can work together, much less thrive, Cuban wants to re-sign Irving. Yes, even after Kyrie described the Mavs as “a little bit of a cluster— right now,” adding, “Upper management, who are they as people? What do they expect from me? The big question, why they traded for me. And, you know, what does it look like for the future?” It’s possible no other NBA team will want Irving, including the Lakers, despite James’ public lobbying on Irving’s behalf. It could be Cuban and Irving are stuck with each other, which immediately starts the clock on Doncic’s exit.
Don’t let Cuban scoot away and say he’s not tanking. Asked the other night about the fans who might prefer a lottery pick over a 10th playoff seedings, he said, “Of course, I understand. We’re four games out of fifth, but we are where we are.” And where they are allowed them to take a dive. Yep, he was plotting even then. He claims Kidd’s job is safe, but Cuban also said this: “I don’t think it’s J-Kidd’s problem that we didn’t have an identity. The game changed in ways we didn’t expect it to change, so I blew it. It was on me, personally.” Doesn’t that sound like the dreaded vote of confidence?
The NBA has a major perception problem. If teams aren’t trying their hardest to win, night after night, how is this league any different than a pro wrestling script? Last week brought an agreement with the Players Association for seven more years of labor peace, whipping open the doors for Silver to demand more than $70 billion in new broadcast deals. David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, is a budget-pincher who doubts the whopping price despite the presence of Charles Barkley in his TNT studio stable, saying, “We don’t have to have the NBA.” Disney’s Sir Robert Iger, meanwhile, is a huge basketball fan with floor seats in Los Angeles. He loves the NBA and is cutting 7,000 jobs in part so he can pay Silver.
And to think Iger has Mark Cuban on his payroll, thanks to “Shark Tank.” That itemization alone should give the mogul pause about feeding the league with tens of billions. Why spend outrageous fees for a phony product?
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.