He’s piling on, but he’s got a right to, as most billionaires usually feel they do.
He’s a billionaire who is letting other billionaires make their billions on the back of free labor from teenagers, and he doesn’t like the way those billionaires are training his future employees. Training that this particular billionaire, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, doesn’t have to pay a penny for. Mark Cuban thinks the NCAA is hurting the NBA with its anachronistic play-calling, poor refereeing, and outdated shot clock length, and he’s not wrong:
"It's horrible. It's ridiculous," Cuban said. "It's worse than high school. You've got 20 to 25 seconds of passing on the perimeter and then somebody goes and tries to make a play and do something stupid, and scoring's gone down.
"The referees couldn't manage a White Castle. Seriously, the college game is more physical than the NBA game, and the variation in how it's called from game to game [is a problem]. Hell, they don't even have standards on balls. They use different balls. One team's got one ball, the other team's got another ball. There are so many things that are ridiculous."
[…]
"If they want to keep kids in school and keep them from being pro players, they're doing it the exact right way by having the 35-second shot clock and having the game look and officiated the way it is," Cuban said Wednesday night. "Just because kids don't know how to play a full game of basketball.
"You've got three kids passing on the perimeter. With 10 seconds on the shot clock, they try to make something happen and two other kids stand around. They don't look for anything and then run back on defense, so there's no transition game because two out of five or three out of five or in some cases four out of five kids aren't involved in the play.”
Cuban went on to call NCAA ball “uglier than ugly” in his comments prior to Dallas’ rather aesthetically-pleasing 107-104 win over the Phoenix Suns on Wednesday (so aesthetically pleasing that Jeff Van Gundy decided to ignore the game for five whole minutes to rehash 197 blog posts from last December about playoff seeding). Again, he’s not wrong.
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This isn’t an NBA vs. NCAA argument. Preferences are preferences, and it’s just fine to enjoy NCAA ball even if others deem that it isn’t the “better” game. We’re obviously in the pro camp, but “better” will always be in the eye of the beholder. I, for one, will always prefer the Minutemen to Mozart.
Cuban’s preferences are at the core of this, obviously, but his point about the NCAA failing to prepare potential pros for action warrants investigation.
Andrew Wiggins will be the NBA’s next great star, he should be the 2014-15 NBA Rookie of the Year, and he went to a top-flight program in Kansas for one year of seasoning before heading off to the pros.
He also would have been far better served being selected top overall straight out of high school by the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2013 NBA draft – even if the Cavs were working with a front office and coaching staff at the time that the team (rightfully, and far later than they should have) decided to fire towards the end of what would have been Wiggins’ rookie season. Those 35 games at Kansas, playing big minutes as a freshman, helped gear Wiggins for his professional career; but that season wouldn’t have been nearly as helpful as a season spent playing 80-odd games with a pro team – even if it was the pro team that biffed on structuring Anthony Bennett’s career.
The NBA in the fin de siècle and even after Cuban bought his Mavericks in the first month of 2000 was a terrible watch. Coaches dominated play-calling, hand-checking was considered illegal but rarely called, and every millisecond of the 24-second shot clock was wrung out. Teams sent two players to one side of the court and asked the other three to loiter on the weak side. Allowing for improvisation and, shock horror, three-pointers were considered a sign of weakness by insecure coaches like Larry Brown.
The league responded by cracking down on hand-checking and tightening the backcourt rules violation length. It also legalized a minor version of a strong-side zone in 1999 and abolished illegal defense in 2001. “We changed things,” Cuban reminded on Wednesday.
I’d remind him that nothing really changed until the coaches decided to.
The crackdown on hand-checking in 2004-05 helped, but what really kicked off the NBA’s revival was Mike D’Antoni’s pairing with Steve Nash in Phoenix that season. We thought that then-Mavericks coach Don Nelson was an offensive maverick, but compared to D’Antoni even someone as forward-thinking as Nellie looked like a relative Larry Brown-type who took the ball out of Nash’s hands.
That year’s Finals was one of the uglier on record, with Brown’s Pistons taking on Gregg Popovich’s San Antonio Spurs, but Popovich responded by opening up his heart to change and providing us with one of the more entertaining teams of all time – the Spurs of recent record, still working with Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, and Manu Ginobili at its core.
The NCAA should lower its shot clock, 24 seconds seems almost like an arbitrary number in this era but it would be a good start, and increased attention to hand-checking would help open up lanes even if the NCAA doesn’t move its three-point line back. Nothing, however, is really going to move the needle until the coaches decide to back off. For players to only be entering sets with 10 ticks remaining on a 35-second shot clock has little to do with the shot clock – it’s the coaches who are grinding the action to a halt.
And considering the types that we’re dealing with – coaches who are oftentimes millionaires making their logo-addled big bucks on the back of free labor – the NCAA game isn’t going to change all that much. These are the types of men who seem to have no problem buying into the idea of indentured servitude, and now they’re going to let the 19-year old run with things? Come off it.
This dovetails into what will be Cuban’s upcoming bit of hypocrisy.
He’s rightfully belittling the state of the NCAA game, and the NCAA’s pathetic brand of stasis when it comes to thinking on its feet. He’s also chiding the NCAA for not properly training his future players for free, happily looking that gift horse in the mouth.
Worse yet? In the 2017 collective bargaining agreement talks Cuban will likely join 29 other NBA owners in demanding that the NBA raise its age limit, preventing players from jumping to the league after one year of college ball. Because the NBA’s D-League pays so little, top, middling and even fringe prospects will stick to the NCAA for exposure, and NBA owners will happily not pay for two years of sub-standard pro training for the best of the best. Even if the best of the best work for heralded programs like Kansas, Duke, and Kentucky, they would still be receiving sub-standard training.
It doesn’t matter if Cuban’s Mavs aren’t scouring the Final Four for their next draftees. The Mavs have been in exactly one lottery since the turn of the century, thanks mostly to the quite-secure Cuban’s ability to take chances and also hire the right basketball people.
If Mark really wants his words to truly count, he’ll go against the grain in 2017. Not only should he fight against his fellow owners for an age limit increase, he needs to argue that it should be abolished altogether.
The NBA doesn’t need the NCAA anymore. Cuban, of all people, should know that.
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Kelly Dwyer 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!
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