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Mark Cuban, frustrated with NBA referees, briefly considered selling his Mavs in 2006
We listened to Zach Lowe’s interview with Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban at Grantland last week, and as always with those two the back and forth was fascinating. We did miss one rather important part, however, stuck in the middle of a Cuban anecdote about former NBA refereeing chief Ronnie Nunn.
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Cuban actually considered selling his Mavericks in 2006, at the peak of Dirk Nowitzki’s powers, as he was despondent over the state of the NBA’s referee crew. The Dallas Morning News pointed out that bit of information in its transcription of the podcast on Monday night. Here’s Cuban:
“There’s still a lot of room for improvement but I think transparency makes a huge difference. I think the biggest change that’s going to happen that (NBA commissioner Adam Silver) has really started to push through is in recruiting and training.
“I remember back after 2006 when I was just going bananas and it really was the only time I was looking at selling the team, sitting down with them and showing them a list at that point and time where all our most recent refs over the past 10 years had worked at prior to coming to the NBA, and they were all from two conferences: the Southern, I think, whichever conference had Belmont. They were two really tiny conferences and it was because the college coach of the then head of officials, Ronnie Nunn, was the head of officiating in those two conferences. So we had this little back scratching arrangement which nobody even knew existed. Didn’t even know existed. Since that time we’ve started to make headway in better recruiting of officials but now we’re really starting to take it seriously.”
(#Actually the Belmont Bruins were in the Atlantic Sun Conference back then. They currently play in the Ohio Valley Conference.)
A quick breeze through the NBA annals will tell you that Cuban’s Mavericks were at their absolute peak in 2006, making the NBA Finals that year and earning the NBA’s best record the following season. What should have been the happiest days of Cuban’s basketball life, however, was rocked by a calamitous NBA Finals collapse against the Heat, and a borderline shocking (to some, at least) first round ouster in 2007 at the hands of Golden State.
All along the way, the refs were the target. Cuban didn’t fully blame them on record for his team’s defeat, as he annoyingly did routinely during his first few years running the franchise, but the silent and seething anger was there. Miami shot 52 more free throws than the Mavericks in the series, spread out over only six games, with Dwyane Wade averaging a ridiculous 16.2 per game (and taking 25 in a pivotal Game 5 overtime loss). Golden State was allowed to set the terms of conflict in the first round the next year.
Caveats abound, though.
Yes, the training and hiring practices for the referees may have been off and, some would contend, corrupt (Nunn hasn’t been in charge of the referee corps since the Tim Donaghy scandal hit in 2008, most recently he worked on camera at NBA TV). Dallas has its own issues to blame here, though. Mavs coach Avery Johnson repeatedly went with an aggressive style of defense on Wade, often using the slower Adrian Griffin who bodied and hand-checked him using an outmoded style of defense that was mostly (and thankfully) outlawed by the NBA a season before. It wasn’t pretty, but Wade intelligently took advantage. This isn’t to say that there weren’t bad calls, there were. The Mavs’ perimeter defense was playing by 2003 rules in 2006, though.
Meanwhile, not only had lottery-bound Golden State teams played Dallas well during the regular seasons in the years before 2006-07, they also had a team that was better than its eighth seed would suggest (in the loaded West) and the benefit of former Mavs coach Don Nelson calling the shots. An inspired Nelson paired with lingering matchup issues to combine for an upset that really wasn’t all that mind-blowing despite Dallas’ league-leading record.
Cuban had every right to be despondent with the mixture of the Nunn realization, those two playoff failures, the critical hit he took during the ascendency of former Mavs point guard Steve Nash in Phoenix, and the critical hit he took in 2007-08 (something I joined in with fervor) when he traded a seeming future star in Devin Harris for a slowing Jason Kidd. Despite all the winning from back then, and despite Dirk’s brilliance, those are a lot of hits to take.
And for him to notice that the NBA seemed to hire quite a bit of referees that just happened to work in a tiny NCAA conference under the former head coach of the NBA’s director of officials, well, you can see why he’d be pretty steamed. Even if Joe Crawford, Joe Derosa, Bennett Salvatore (the referees on hand for Game 5 of the 2006 NBA Finals) had nothing to do with the arrangement.
It’s just fine to roll your eyes when Mark Cuban falls just short of claiming that every referee is out to get his Mavericks, something he did incessantly in his first few years owning this franchise. You can’t deny that, behind the scenes, he hasn’t been an absolute boon for the league as it attempts to improve its ability to bring order to the Toughest Game to Call.
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is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops
