Cuban fined 200K for stepping onto court - Dallas-Mavs.com Forums

mary · 05-10-2006, 03:48 PM

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/playof...ory?id=2440355

The NBA fined Mavericks owner Mark Cuban $200,000 for going onto the court in Game 1 of Dallas' series against the Spurs and criticizing league officials on his blog, ESPN's Jim Gray is reporting.

Cuban was fined $100,000 for going onto the court and another $100,000 for being critical of the league regarding the selection of playoff officials, and how to improve playoff officiating on blogmaverick.com.

"The NBA knows all, does all, and far be it for me to question any of this." Cuban told Gray.

Cuban also said that he wrote the article before the playoffs and simply reposted it after Game 1.

Dallas lost 87-85 in Game 1 on Sunday, but rebounded Tuesday night with a 113-91 victory to even the series at one game apiece.

allahu akbar · 05-10-2006, 03:49 PM

That's weak. The league seems to have something against the guy.

sixeightmkw · 05-10-2006, 03:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mary

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/playof...ory?id=2440355

The NBA fined Mavericks owner Mark Cuban $200,000 for going onto the court in Game 1 of Dallas' series against the Spurs and criticizing league officials on his blog, ESPN's Jim Gray is reporting.

Cuban was fined $100,000 for going onto the court and another $100,000 for being critical of the league regarding the selection of playoff officials, and how to improve playoff officiating on blogmaverick.com.

"The NBA knows all, does all, and far be it for me to question any of this." Cuban told Gray.

Cuban also said that he wrote the article before the playoffs and simply reposted it after Game 1.

Dallas lost 87-85 in Game 1 on Sunday, but rebounded Tuesday night with a 113-91 victory to even the series at one game apiece.

I love the media. You have to give it to them. They love to distort the truth. Please everyone, read this blog before posting. He critizied the NBA for how they SELECT officials. He did not critizize the refs themselves. He wants to make sure there are veteran officials on the floor and not rookie refs as there has been so far.

Murphy3 · 05-10-2006, 03:54 PM

Cuban's an embarrassment.. The league's system for handing out fines is an embarrassment. At least both are consistent.

allahu akbar · 05-10-2006, 03:55 PM

Yea, that's why i said it's weak. After reading the blog, you'd see that they should actually be considering his idea rather than fining him.

But there is one problem with his idea. Limited refs equals stronger possibility of paying off or buying a ref.

Milles · 05-10-2006, 03:58 PM

Just wondering, has Stern appeared at a Mavs game this year?

That would be interesting, listening to Stern and Cuban throw pot-shots at one another from 20 paces.

orangedays · 05-10-2006, 04:04 PM

That's 20 trips to Bungalow 8...out the window.

Disco and Armin can't be too happy about this.

Arne · 05-10-2006, 04:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by orangedays

That's 20 trips to Bungalow 8...out the window.

Disco and Armin can't be too happy about this.

As far as I remember it that article was basically written by a guy nobody believes when he reports about other "issues".

rabbitproof · 05-10-2006, 04:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by orangedays

That's 20 trips to Bungalow 8...out the window.

Disco and Armin can't be too happy about this.

Haha.

orangedays · 05-10-2006, 04:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arne

As far as I remember it that article was basically written by a guy nobody believes when he reports about other "issues".

He also referred to his source as a 'snitch'. An eyewitness 'snitch' who had nothing better to do than follow Cuban from the door at Bungalow 8 to the Pink Elephant and then Scores West.

Maybe I should have suggested trading for Antoine Walker to make my sarcasm more evident.

Five-ofan · 05-10-2006, 04:44 PM

This is really 20 times worse than grabbing an opposing players little kaman?

dude1394 · 05-10-2006, 04:46 PM

They should have made it a million. Cuban could have cost the mavs a tech foul there. Keep your butt on the bench like everyone else. Your team is busting their rear end out there and to have to contend with you messing with them is too much.

As far as criticizing the refs, I'll have to read his blog to comment on that.

MavKikiNYC · 05-10-2006, 06:38 PM

The higher the fine, the more sensitive the league is. Cuban is hitting too close to home for them.

He should, however, keep his pudgy butt in the stands.

Five-ofan · 05-10-2006, 08:15 PM

He stepped on the court AFTER the game. Thats an effing joke.

MavsFanFinley · 05-10-2006, 08:42 PM

What do the Spurs get for whining?

bernardos70 · 05-10-2006, 09:20 PM

Nothing. Cause they're the effin' Spurs, and you better recognize.

birdsanctuary · 05-10-2006, 09:28 PM

The stupid thing is that they'll fine Cuban and then probably come up with a plan just like his and propose it to the owners next year.

Nash13 · 05-10-2006, 10:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MavsFanFinley

What do the Spurs get for whining?

Favorable calls their way in Game 3.

bernardos70 · 05-10-2006, 11:03 PM

Reggie Evans: "Oh, how many nuts I could have grabbed for that much!"

Rhylan · 05-10-2006, 11:38 PM

I want some details on what "stepping on the court" entails.

We all know Cuban goes onto the court during timeouts to eavesdrop a few feet back from the huddle.

Secondly, the officiating stuff on his blog was alright, some good points made, but definitely no bomb throwing. I'm kinda mystified by the league response, actually.

nashtymavsfan13 · 05-11-2006, 12:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Five-ofan

This is really 20 times worse than grabbing an opposing players little kaman?

That Evans fine was so messed up. He should be suspended like 5 games the begining of next season and fined a ton more than 10k

Arne · 05-11-2006, 02:25 AM

This is total bullshit. He stepped on the court after the game??? That's ridiculous.

They fine him 200k for reposting an article for which they could've already fined him for months, but didn't and for stepping onto the court after a game.

kriD · 05-11-2006, 02:47 AM

League fines Cuban $200,000

By EDDIE SEFKO / The Dallas Morning News

Mark Cuban vows that he will continue to be vocal on issues that he believes can be improved, even after the NBA tagged him for $200,000 in fines for separate incidents, including comments about officiating made on his blog.

"Change," Cuban said Wednesday, "never comes cheap."

The Mavericks owner was docked $100,000 for going onto the court late in Game 1 of the Western Conference semifinals against San Antonio at AT&T Center. During a timeout, he was in between the Mavericks' bench and midcourt while yelling at officials.

Another $100,000 fine was assessed for the blog item, in which Cuban criticized the league for using too many officials in the playoffs rather than just selecting the 12 most experienced refs and going with them exclusively.

It's not the first time Cuban has been fined for something he wrote on his blog. He said he was fined last year for writing about the season starting on election day.

In the blog on officials, Cuban said: "Giving less qualified officials an opportunity to officiate playoff games as a reward gives the official a nice attaboy, but it risks the quality of our product. It makes absolutely no sense to do it the way it is currently done. If the league wants the best officiating in every game, only use the best officials. Anything less cheats us all."

An NBA representative confirmed the fines Wednesday.

Van Horn might practice: Coach Avery Johnson said Keith Van Horn could be allowed to do some catch-and-shoot drills today and that his return from right hand surgery could occur before the Mavericks leave town again.

"We're hopeful, if the latest X-rays are good, he might be able to practice on Friday," Johnson said.

It is conceivable Van Horn could return for Game 4 on Monday. Van Horn said he hopes to go through a practice or two, then get clearance for game action. He missed the last nine games of the season and all six playoff games.

Game 3 at 7 p.m.: The starting time for Saturday's game was moved to 7 p.m. from 4 p.m. so that it can be carried in prime time by ABC. The network planned to show Detroit-Cleveland. But with the Pistons up, 2-0, the luster may have worn off LeBron-mania.

Briefly: Johnson has tried to keep things in perspective after the Game 2 win, but he makes no bones about the importance of coming home tied 1-1 rather than in a 2-0 hole. "I don't think you want to spot the Spurs two games," he said. ... Jason Terry had a feeling the insertion of Devin Harris into the starting lineup would work wonders for the Mavericks. But he couldn't say so until after Game 2. "I didn't want to tip my hand," he said. "It was like poker. But I thought we'd get back to the way we like to play. We need to get into transition and be aggressive." Harris agreed: "Most of Game 1, we played at their pace – a very low-scoring game with not a lot of fast-break points. We walked the ball up, and that's not our style."

Usually Lurkin · 05-11-2006, 07:02 AM

$100,000 worth of advertisement for his blog and for the ideas he's pushing.

MavKikiNYC · 05-11-2006, 07:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Usually Lurkin

$100,000 worth of advertisement for his blog and for the ideas he's pushing.

$100,000 worth of briar patch, Brer' Stern.

dude1394 · 05-11-2006, 07:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rhylan

I want some details on what "stepping on the court" entails.

We all know Cuban goes onto the court during timeouts to eavesdrop a few feet back from the huddle.

Secondly, the officiating stuff on his blog was alright, some good points made, but definitely no bomb throwing. I'm kinda mystified by the league response, actually.

If I understood some folks descriptions. He went almost halfway to the center court after a referee. Del Harris intercepted him. If it had been during a game a sure tech but as it was a timeout the refs didn't do anything.

dalmations202 · 05-11-2006, 08:33 AM

Typical NBA -- they can't accept criticism or even help. Anything that might come between them and the $$$$ must be wrong, even if they are correct. They prove the fact with these fines for criticism, that they don't care about the integrity of the game -- they care about perception and the $$$$.

madape · 05-11-2006, 08:36 AM

So Cuban's c*ck shrunk a little bit. It just means another $200K he won't be able to spend at strip clubs or online poker sites. Meanwhile, the refs gain another reason for biasing calls against the Mavs and the Mavkericks reinforce themselves amongst their critics as a franchise full of whining pussies.

MavsFanFinley · 05-11-2006, 07:43 PM

How much will Cuban pay to bash refs? 'Depends'

By JIM LITKE, AP Sports Columnist
May 11, 2006

Overlook the fact that he owns the team, that he's already shelled out more than a million bucks to bash referees and who knows how much more to study them, and Mark Cuban is just like every other fan of the Dallas Mavericks.

All he wants is justice.

How much more he's willing to pay for it is another matter.

The problem for Cuban is that the NBA can't or won't overlook the ownership part, which means his desire for fair play will require reaching ever deeper into his pocket.

The league's latest forget-me-not arrived on Cuban's desk earlier this week in the form of $200,000 fine -- half for taking his beef with the officials onto the court during the Mavericks loss to the Spurs in Game 1 of the playoffs, the other half for an entry titled "How to improve NBA Playoff Officiating" that Cuban had posted earlier on his Web site.

Cuban was only a few weeks into his first full season as an owner when he notched the first fine -- $5,000 for berating officials after a loss to the Kings in November, 2000. And according to an unofficial total compiled from news reports and a league insider, he's paid another $1 million, minimum, for the pleasure of doing it again and again.

That's in addition to $400,000 or so for criticizing, ignoring or violating various other league rules and regulations down through the years. And just for good measure, Cuban has deposited an amount equal to those fines in the coffers of a handful of charities and plans to continue doing so. That's roughly $3 million.

All of which begged the question put to Cuban in an e-mail Thursday: How much further is he willing to pay to speak his various pieces.

"Depends," Cuban wrote back, "on the value I saw to the league."

That reply was in keeping with the maverick owner's suddenly sharpened sense of discretion; that, or else Cuban has begun looking for answers on the slips of paper tucked into fortune cookies. When news of the latest fine leaked out, his response to a request for comment read simply, "Change in any business never comes cheaply."

No kidding.

Being a billionaire, as well as a novice to the buttoned-down world of ownership, Cuban was once both candid and long-winded about the hits he suffered at commissioner David Stern's hands. Who can forget his saying that league director of officials Ed Rush "might have been a great ref, but I wouldn't hire him to manage a Dairy Queen" -- a quip that cost Cuban a cool $500,000 in January, 2002.

Judging by Sunday's outburst, he's still not satisfied with the officiating, just more careful about what he says.

In Thursday's e-mail, Cuban would only describe the cost of hiring someone to scour box scores, watch videotapes and analyze a league's worth of referees' tendencies as "a lot." His answer to whether the league had ever asked to see the studies or incorporated any of the conclusions was shorter still.

"No."

That's not true, though, and Cuban knows it.

The commissioner recently came out and said the league's own studies showed that officials made the right call about 95 percent of the time, an acknowledgment that owed, in part, to Cuban's relentless campaigning. Besides, plenty of the things that the NBA has mandated for its officials in recent years -- among them, remedial sessions, videotape study and independent reviews -- have been in response to the criticism Cuban has aired.

Stern, if truth be told, regards Cuban as more friend than foe, especially because he's limited his bashing of the referees to issues of competency and not the league-wide conspiracy theories that drive the commissioner nuts.

He's had far fewer reasons to discipline Cuban since the $500,000 whack. Neither the owner nor the league has said much in public about the few incidents since, but suffice it to say the total doesn't match the "Dairy Queen" episode. Then again, Stern has set the floor for berating his referees at $100,000, and for multiple offenders like Cuban, prices can go through the roof in a hurry.

For his part, Cuban is more mellow and a little more mature now that he has a family in tow and a team good enough to legitimately challenge for a title. He still has too much invested in his image as a rebel to cozy up to Stern, and too little self-control to keep the fan that lurks inside from breaking out and running onto the floor to berate an official on occasion.

What it adds up to is an expensive and sometimes-uneasy truce that will stand as long as both of them remember what's best for the business.

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke@ap.org

Drbio · 05-11-2006, 08:10 PM

The NBA fining him for the blog stuff is retarded. What a crock. I didn't see him step on the court. He is an animated little bastard during the game though. But I never saw him on the court.

Murphy3 · 05-11-2006, 08:20 PM

If he's on the court yelling at the refs in any situation before or after the game, the 100k fine was warranted. But, the fine for the blog is just ridiculous.

dude1394 · 05-11-2006, 08:33 PM

100K for what was on his blog is bs. Little lord flauntleroy stern just can't handle constructive criticism it seems.

mary · 05-11-2006, 11:00 PM

A picture is worth a 1000 words

(sorry...ran across this and it cracked me up...continue on....)

dn0 · 05-11-2006, 11:10 PM

cuban cries loudly and gets fined. The sky is blue. What else is new?
I didn't see any complaints about the referees on game 2? Coincidence?

Now that game was officiated "The Right Way". f**ing hypocrite.

dude1394 · 05-12-2006, 12:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dn0

cuban cries loudly and gets fined. The sky is blue. What else is new?
I didn't see any complaints about the referees on game 2? Coincidence?

Now that game was officiated "The Right Way". f**ing hypocrite.

dumb cluck...you didn't see any complaints about the referees on his blog at all. You saw him getting fined for coming out on the court but everyone (cuban included) probably thinks that was okay.

kriD · 05-13-2006, 02:26 AM

Sit back and enjoy the ride

Cuban's contributions speak volumes; time to let Mavs' play do talking

[By Tim Cowlishaw / The Dallas Morning News]

This is a time that Mark Cuban should have his work as an NBA owner applauded and celebrated. Instead, he is getting fined for it.

Cuban shouldn't be in the news in this Western Conference semi- final showdown. It should be all about Dirk Nowitzki and Tim Duncan and Devin Harris and Tony Parker.

The officiating is not the story line, and Mavericks coach Avery Johnson has worked hard to get his team to stop whining about officials. Nowitzki will still make the occasional complaint, but nothing like he used to and nothing like Tim "I Get Fouled on Every Play" Duncan.

Officiating is a crutch that Johnson has removed from his locker room. Cuban's screaming at officials in Game 1 and his determination to fix all the league's officiating woes on his blog threaten to restore an excuse to a team that shouldn't need one.

If the Mavericks players see Cuban screaming about calls, that opens the door for them to respond in similar fashion. That's not good.

And if refs see Cuban yelling at them, and you know they do – well, as one Maverick said to me this week, "Refs are human, so you never know. You'd hate to think they would make a call against us for that, but who knows?"

Cuban was fined $200,000 for going onto the court in Game 1 and yelling at officials and for his criticism of them on his blog. His criticism, if you read it, was very tame and right on. The league does use too many officials in the playoffs.

But there's a time and place to make that complaint. Round 2 of the playoffs, when the franchise you have built appears positioned to scale new heights, is not that time.

Cuban doesn't care about being fined, of course, and the publicity he generates by making himself the story serves him well financially in other areas. In reality, he probably will make money off the latest fine, but that's not the issue.

Cuban has been at his best as an NBA owner in the last year. Putting Johnson in place as the head coach, changing the culture of the team and developing a relationship with the head coach that is the opposite of his head-butting with Don Nelson should qualify Cuban as Owner of the Year.

He threatens to undermine a lot of that with his childlike antics during games. Cuban has admitted he resorts to being a fan at court- side, that he can't help himself.

He's definitely smart enough to help himself and help his team by calming down, by staying off the court, by not being so visible in voicing his displeasure with officials' calls.

The best refs are going to get calls wrong. Everyone including Cuban understands that and, to his credit, much of the behind-the-scenes work Cuban has done has been acknowledged or adopted by the league office. Officiating is a little better than it was when he came into the league, and he can take some of the credit.

Being a whiner and a yeller during games serves him no value. Although coaches including Phil Jackson have said they think the Mavericks get more than their share of calls at home, the numbers do not illustrate that.

It's much easier to imagine an official making a call against Dallas after listening to Cuban's screaming than giving the Mavericks a call because of it.

The truth is that it probably doesn't happen either way.

But the Mavericks should not be known as a whining team. They once were one of the worst but they are not nearly as bad anymore.

This is a team that has a very real chance to knock off the San Antonio Spurs and keep rolling into June. The character of this team has a lot to do with the personality of the head coach, and Cuban is the one who put Johnson in a position to have success.

We should be cheering Cuban for that today and not hoping that, tonight, he doesn't act like a 12-year-old who just had his favorite video game taken away from him.

If he goes onto the court again and challenges officials, the NBA has no choice but to suspend him. Given that all the value he brings to the franchise comes before the ball goes in the air, that wouldn't be the worst thing to happen to the Mavericks.