NBA: Why Mark Cuban's latest statement is wrong

Just before the Christmas Holidays in an interview with Eurohoops.net, Mark Cuban’s response about how Luka Doncic’s professional experience led to his early NBA success said:

“It is important because you’re used to people being older than you but I think he just learned how to play basketball and that’s the biggest gift. When you’re gifted as he is and you actually learn to play the game.If you look at the basketball education of kids starting at 11-years old in Europe and particularly Slovenia which is basketball oriented. If we took our best kids and seven years before they are McDonald’s all-American, we sent them over to Slovenia to get an education, the league would be a thousand times better. They just learn how to play basketball while our guys learn how to taunt and put together mixtapes.”

Mark Cuban is a very outspoken personality. The owner of the Dallas Mavericks has been for years. He has made comments that, while may be true or false, have been somewhat troublesome and gotten him in trouble with the NBA.

For example, just last year he was fined $600,000.00 dollars by the NBA for stating the following in a podcast about a conversation he had with players on his Mavericks squad:

"Look, losing is our best option."

Again he may have been correct but you cannot just openly admit you are trying to tank a season to acquire the best draft pick you can. If the Mavericks did tank last season it helped them get the 5th overall pick which was good enough to trade Trae Young for Luka Doncic.

While Doncic is clearly the front runner as the rookie of the year and his past playing experience may have much to do with his imminent success, Doncic, with all due respect, is not the greatest draft pick ever in the history of the NBA as Cuban appears to want everyone to believe.

Cuban’s comments to Eurohoops.net raise a lot of questions about Mark Cuban’s socio-economic philosophy and stereotypical beliefs but there are several reasons why he is simply wrong:

Taunts and Mixtapes are part of the Basketball culture

We will address his concern about taunting first. Perhaps Mark Cuban has an issue with extroverted personalities because the irony here is that he is extraverted himself. His history of owning the Dallas Mavericks has been about taunting opponents and calling out poor officiating mainly against his Mavericks.

In a letter from the officials' association's counsel, a number of examples of Cuban's treatment of the NBA's officiating crews and the effect it may be having was submitted back in 2017.

"In a recent letter to Byron Spruell, the NBA’s president of league operations, NBRA general counsel Lee Seham outlined what the union considers to be a lengthy pattern of documented violations by Cuban of the NBA constitution and “undue influence of the league’s management of its officials.”

“We consider the threat to the integrity of NBA basketball presented by Mr. Cuban’s misconduct to be real and growing,” Seham wrote on Dec. 9."

Michael Jordan used to stick out his tongue before making a ridiculously outstanding play. Dikembe Mutombo used to wag his finger at opponents who shot he had just rejected. Kevin Garnett was a known trash talker.

It certainly didn’t define the quality of their play. The NBA over the years has tried to limit the taunting and intimidation of opponents but they certainly haven’t banned it. Issuing enormous fines against Mark Cuban hasn’t censored him much either. However, basketball is an emotional game.

Basketball is a game of ebbs and flows. There are moments where everything goes wrong deflating players and then suddenly everything clicks and there is much elation among the players.

Fans cheer and get fired up when their favorite player lets out a yell after a blocked shot or flexes a bicep after a dunk. Taunting is an expression of the emotional turmoil up and down that a player feels over the course of a game and a season.

In regards to Cuban's “mixtapes” reference its not clear if he was making a reference to American players' musical preferences or if he was referring to highlight reel packages. Such highlight reels are used to sell the value of young prospects hoping to be drafted to the NBA. A highlight reel of a player's best plays helps NBA scouts and general managers make informed decisions about who to draft.

While it is a tool to these decision makers, it is one of several tools designed and used to assess young entry-level talent coming to the NBA. A player's ability to dunk, his vertical leap off of one foot or a two-foot plant, rebounding stats, length vertically (wingspan), and even standing reach are all measured tracked and recorded. If a team wanted a rebounder, leaping ability is a key factor in who you draft. Why draft a 7-foot player if he can’t dunk the basketball or coordinate the use of his size or length.

NBA fans didn’t boo Vince Carter, who played for the Mavericks when he executed one of his gravity-defying dunks. If Mark Cuban feels that the culture or system of how players are drafted or developed needs changing then he should have been clear and concise on that point.

American players understand and learn the game just fine

To accept Mark Cuban’s statement is to acknowledge that there is talent around the world, in particular, Slovenia that’s better than what’s in the NBA. Cuban would be wrong. First, Kobe Bryant, Jermaine O’Neal, Kevin Garnett, and LeBron James are examples of some of the greatest NBA players to ever play in the NBA.

Another thing they have in common is they all got drafted to the NBA right out of high school. They learned to play at an elite level in the best basketball league in the world as teenagers.

James may be the highest scoring NBA superstar ever in less than three seasons and has three NBA Championships. Kobe Bryant is 3rd on the scoring list and is a 5 time NBA Champion.

Kevin Garnett ranks 20th among the highest scorers in the game all-time and is an NBA Champion as well. Further, none of these players can be simply called a taunter or a dunker. We are invoking the names of some of the most complete and dominant players of the last 20-25 years.

Cuban has seen these players up close and personal as the owner of the Mavericks. This group of players was never basketball never deficient in skills anyway. They had to learn as the years went by but they were talented. Further one can compile a list of European talent that failed in their aspirations to succeed in the NBA equally as North American players have too.

What Mark Cuban needs to separate out is that there are physical skills and intangible skills. A player can have all the physical gifts but lack the intangibles of heart, desire, and passion to be the best like a Kwame Brown. Without these intangibles, a good player will not improve like Michael Jordan did and it’s a guessing game which players will have the drive to be the best and execute it at the highest levels of excellence.

NBA player development and the G-League

One area where Mark Cuban’s comments carry some authority is in examining the NBA’s role in developing young talent. If this conversation came up 20-25 years ago then yes Cuban is right that young players not at the level of talent of Luka Doncic when they are first considered a potential player in the NBA were not given homegrown opportunities to develop their raw talents.

In the past, American basketball players who were on the fringe, got cut or went undrafted by the NBA had to try and develop into NBA worthy talent overseas. This worked for players like Antonio Davis and Anthony Parker who played overseas in men’s leagues before they got their first real shots in the NBA with the Toronto Raptors. This situation has changed with the development and expansion of the G-League.

While the NBA has always received the bulk of its young talent from the collegiate ranks the two games are not the same. NCAA basketball is played in two halves of 20 minutes each for a total of 40 minutes. An NBA game is 48 minutes. The three-point arc is closer in the college game than in the NBA at just 20 feet 9 inches away from the basket.

NBA rules require a team to shoot the basketball in 24 seconds the college game has a 45-second shot so the pace and speed is slower than in the NBA. Guards dominate the play in the college game on the perimeter and centers and forwards play the post.

The pro game is now demanding that power forwards and centers take a more active role in dribbling the ball and attacking on offense from the perimeter using their ball handling skills and long-range shooting.

When the CBA (Continental Basketball Association) folded in 2009 young players not ready for NBA competition had to essentially travel overseas to get educated, as Mark Cuban likes, in the pro game. So while the NBA has been slow to create a developmental league to develop youth and players on the fringe of making the Association, the NBA has now invested in what used to be called the D-League and now the G-League.

Introduced in 2001 it began operations with just eight franchise. As of right now, the G-League now has 27 franchises just 3 less than the total number of teams in the NBA. General managers can send 1st and 2nd-year players who need seasoning to the G-League to develop on two-way contracts.

This allows NBA teams to call those G-League prospects up to the NBA and send them back as required. The trade-off is the prospect player gets into more games that are similar in style and pace to the NBA game.

At the moment the G-League franchise Texas Legends are affiliated with the Dallas Mavericks so Mark Cuban and his management team have a wonderful opportunity to educate their American prospects, whose rights they hold, in the appropriate ways of basketball.

Once the NBA is able to partner its pro franchise in a 1:1 ratio with G-League franchises every NBA franchise will have the opportunity to dictate to the G-League’s head coaches what offensive and defensive schemes they would like their prospects to be trained under to match the pro team's style. If Cuban’s comments to Eurohoops.net are about the past he’d have a point. If they are about the present the NBA has made big strides in addressing their previous perceived indifference to youth development.

Socio-economic constraints

Dallas Mavericks v Los Angeles Lakers - Game Two

There is a small percentage of college basketball players whose parents can afford to pay their aspiring basketball star of a son’s college bills which is why so many of the collegiate draftees in the NBA go to college on an athletic scholarship. Economics is also a strong determining factor in why so many NBA draftees declare for the NBA Draft after one season. They and their families come from modest means. The opportunity to earn a multi-million dollar contract at 19 or 20 years old is a life or family changing opportunity.

For Mark Cuban to suggest that even if at age 11, a child is assessed to have exceptional basketball skill or IQ that you should send them to Slovenia ignores the reality that if the player’s parents couldn’t afford college in North America without their son getting a scholarship who pays to send these kids to Slovenia?

How do they get visas to attend elementary school and high school in Slovenia? Will they live there from age 11-18 years old and perhaps beyond to work in the Euro Basketball Leagues until the NBA comes calling? Mark? Cuban may not have thought this statement through.

Further, while Luka Doncic is doing splendid things in a Dallas Mavericks' uniform pools of talent like winning and losing streaks can be cyclical. For instance, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was the former Yugoslavia National team that supplied the NBA with star talents like Vlade Divac, Drazen Petrovic, Toni Kukoc and Dino Radja.

In the first decade of the 2000s, we saw a number of Spanish stars coveted in the NBA like Jose Calderon, the Gasol brothers Marc and Pau, Sergio Rodriguez, Ricky Rubio, Rudy Fernandez and Serge Ibaka. Five years from now it is likely another nation not named Slovenia who will supply the NBA with multiple talented players.

If Mark Cuban wants to make an investment in ensuring high-quality coaching, basketball facilities, and player development in Slovenia that would be a great thing for the game of basketball worldwide.

If Marc Cuban was reminiscing about 2011 when his roster included star players like Jason Kidd, Jason Terry, Shawn Marion, and Dirk Nowitzki was in his prime he picked a strange way to try and recruit star players for the future. Most potential free agents may have simply heard from this statement that Cuban might prefer European players. This adds a self-inflicted wound to trouble Cuban is already facing as:

“According to Sports Illustrated, employees were subjected to all kinds of unacceptable behavior and had to work in a locker room culture. “It was a real-life Animal House,” said one Mavs employee who left after a five-year career with the organization. “And I only say ‘was’ because I’m not there anymore. I’m sure it’s still going on,” she said.”

Mark Cuban’s statement to Eurohoops.net does not help recover the Dallas Mavericks' glory days. It does not help attract new talent from a pool in which Mark Cuban may have made the fish allergic who he wants to bite at his future contractual offers if the Mavericks are to be competitive again.