Outspoken Mavericks owner Mark Cuban went off on college basketball Wednesday evening, and while his diction can often offend, his gripes with the college game mirror many of our own. The NBA is better, but we would have found a better way to say so.
Here are some of his issues with the college game, by way of ESPN Dallas scribe Tim MacMahon:
“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.
“It’s uglier than ugly, and it’s evidenced by the scoring going down. When the NBA went through that, we changed things.”
A couple things here: One, we agree with a lot of that. The 35-second shot clock gives teams too much time to set up, and there’s a lot of wasted movement spent just working the ball around the perimeter without running any sets. It’s terrible for NBA fans to sit through, but these are also 18-22 year-old kids who are still learning the game. Extra time on the shot clock gives them more leeway to organically come up with a good look at the hoop.
Two, no NBA owner should complain about only one or two players getting involved in an offensive play, which Cuban somehow blames on lack of a transition game. Isolations are the norm for team’s like Cleveland, and the rest of the league simply spreads the floor to run pick-and-roll after pick-and-roll. Those sets usually only involve a couple of players (though smart coaches are running other actions on the other side of the court, or splicing pin-downs and back-cuts with the pick-and-rolls).
The Mavericks run more pick-and-rolls that end in a shot, turnover, or foul than any team in the NBA, per Synergy analytics. That takes a lot of the wind out of Cuban’s argument because only two players are involved in that high screen and roll action Dallas runs with Dirk.
But the real issue is the content of his comments.
Aesthetically speaking, we don’t like the college game when it’s compared the NBA version either, and for a lot of the same reasons Cuban points out. But he’s still a privileged white billionaire NBA owner, so maybe he can avoid lines like, “The referees couldn’t manage a White Castle.”
Sounds an awful lot like Cuban’s 2006 Dairy Queen comments about NBA head of officiating, Ed Rush, so maybe Cuban is angling for some managerial time at White Castle. Plus, managing a White Castle, specifically the one we used to go to at the corner and Humboldt and Metropolitan in Brooklyn, is really hard. College basketball refs wouldn’t be able to handle all the strife we saw at that White Castle, and certainly wouldn’t have the judgement to call out the orders correctly. That’s putting down White Castle staff more than it’s an insult to refs.
Cuban’s speaking style is just so angry, the juxtaposition with his cushy life always adds a veneer of sanctimonious bullsh*t to everything he says. College basketball isn’t for everyone, but why get this upset about the differences between the college and NBA game? Cuban has his own plane. Why is he still so angry?
“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.
…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.”
There are a lot of things about men’s college basketball that are ridiculous, but none are as ridiculous as Mark Cuban.
(ESPN)
