Nothing about Mark Cuban’s decision to ban ESPN reporters from covering the Dallas Mavericks appeared to make any sense. He barred national writers Marc Stein and Tim McMahon, the latter covered the team exclusively for years, because ESPN no longer had a dedicated Mavericks beat reporter with McMahon now having more national duties.
ESPN still wanted a presence at Mavericks games, just not a full-time one. Cuban’s response was to forego some coverage from the biggest sports entity in the world, opting instead for no coverage.
SB Nation got Cuban’s rationale for doing this and, as expected, doesn’t follow any sort of logic.
“This wasn’t about editorial,” Cuban told SB Nation in an email Monday. “It wasn’t about a reduction in number of games [covered] this year.”
Instead, Cuban wrote that he’s worried about a lack of “high quality, in depth coverage of every game,” combined with an increased reliance on wire services. The clash was also at least partially influenced by MacMahon’s changing role at ESPN, according to multiple sources.
“If I did nothing and the trend towards more and more games being covered by wire reporters continues, then it could get to the point where it was too late,” Cuban wrote. “I felt like if I didn’t do it now, I wouldn’t have a chance to stop or slow what I felt was a negative trend for the Mavs and NBA.”
As the SB Nation story explains, ESPN assigns reporters to teams based on the quality/popularity of said team. They don’t have 122 reporters to cover every team in every sport. The Mavericks are 1-5 and not expected to be good this season. When LeBron James left the Miami Heat, so did the daily coverage. There’s a reason why there isn’t an ESPN reporter dedicated to a single NHL team. If the team doesn’t move the needle, ESPN isn’t embedding someone there.
Cuban’s one solid point is, yes, if your team is only getting a wire game story written about it, that’s not good for the team. You prefer 800 words about how the team is doing this well/bad instead of an 800-word nuts-and-bolts game story, but if your team is at a point where it doesn’t warrant the former every game, you have to take it whenever someone ESPN wants to give it, even if they are only giving it 25 times per season.
If this is Dirk Nowitzki’s swan song, not allowing ESPN to be around him because you’re in a pissing contest you can’t win isn’t fair to your franchise’s greatest player. If Cuban’s plan is for the Mavericks to get good in a few years then do a “ha, now you want to come back when we’re good again?” thing, that’s not smart either. I can’t figure out why Cuban thinks this is a good idea, long- or short-term.
It’s possible that Cuban knows his team sucks and this prevents a major media company from writing negative things about his team on a regular basis. It could be a way to force more eyeballs to the team site, which will always be positive.
I don’t know. Either way, this is more words than anyone wants about the ins and outs of sports journalism. Let this serve as a lesson that you should go into finance.
