and is probably still wearing the patented Mark Cuban frowny-face.
I don't think Selena Roberts has much respect for Mark Cuban. I also think publicly planning parade routes after Dallas won the first 2 games of a 7 game series was bad karma.
Dallas Followed Cuban's Lead in Losing Its Cool - New York Times ...[Mark] Cuban, the suspicious mind who watched as his Mavericks’ homecoming banner end up draped around the interlopers at American Airlines Center after the Heat won Game 6, 95-92.The casting was all wrong, though. Cuban often mistakes his dot.com wealth for world wide self-righteousness. If he would have paused from his various profane rants over his perception of Heat bias — which cost him a $250,000 league fine yesterday — Cuban would have discovered he was the saboteur of his team’s poise as well as his own status as Stern’s secret love.
It’s true: Cuban had Stern at “Hello.” Although Shaquille O’Neal received his lifetime achievement reward for being shoved to the curb in Los Angeles and Pat Riley finally reclaimed his slicked-back coaching sheen, Cuban’s antics during the finals undermined Stern’s plan to develop the Mavericks’ owner into a league darling, too.
Cuban is a niche marketing hope for a league that has lost suburban fans who feel alienated by players they find too urban, hip-hop and, well, too unlike them.
Cuban is a demographic treasure: a white, 40-something male and a self-made billionaire who is acting out a middle-aged guy’s fantasy by sitting behind the bench of his own sports franchise.
He is the dreamboat of techies, too, with the haircut of a band geek and the wardrobe of a couch fan. And yet, he is cool enough to mingle with George Clooney at the Oscars. He is wired enough to court Dan Rather for his television network; and he is so popular, he landed on the stage as a guest of David Letterman’s.
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But as the ultimate authority of the Mavericks, Cuban usurped his team’s early momentum through the finals with the equivalence of a bad parental model.He cursed the ref; his team cursed the refs. He questioned calls; his coach questioned calls. Even though Cuban admitted last night that he had “an obligation to the league and I wasn’t able to get the job done,” he didn’t think of himself as a distraction.
“No, everyone has been saying that for how long?” he said.
But listen to the Cuban parroting from Jerry Stackhouse as he explained yesterday how “you want the other team to beat you with their best shot and not be given the benefit of the doubt.”
Pay attention to the mimicry as Dallas Coach Avery Johnson crushed the officials to dust on Saturday. See Dirk Nowitzki forget to channel his favorite calming song — a ditty by the German pop star David Hasselhoff, of all Baywatch babes — when he went Cuban-esque by roughing up a stationary bike after Game 5 in Miami. At some point, self-control becomes more of an issue when everything is on the line.
“I just think that if you’re a player on a team and everything around you is about something else, some complaint about how terrible this is or that is, I would think it would ultimately get to the players,” Commissioner Stern said last night. “It’s always a concern to me and I don’t think it’s fair to the game.”
It was a disservice to Dallas in the end. The Mavs reflected their owner’s conduct code to the point of self-destruction, spending their pregame energy obsessing over officiating slights instead of lost leads. And there were plenty, including a 14-point, first-half advantage in Game 6.
“It’s the nature of the playoffs,” Riley said of the Mavs’ behavior. “It creates a lot of tension. It’s like blowing up a balloon. You blow it up, you blow it up, you blow it up. You just don’t want it to pop.”
It popped on the Mavs. With his team ahead in the series by 2-0, Cuban was on a high, leading a parade of over-exuberance before the excessive whining set in.
“It was very motivating,” Wade said, adding. “We took it from there, making history, winning four games in a row.”
How did Dallas experience such a rapid descent? Riley made adjustments and Wade made money shots. The Mavs made excuses. Accountability is not Cuban’s strength, though.
“He is very smart, he has to take credit and should be given credit for putting together a great team and giving his fans the entertainment experience in that building, which is terrific,” Stern told the San Francisco radio station KNBR yesterday. “But at times, I think he loses control and that is not healthy for either him or the game.”
...Cuban’s genius isn’t unconditional, though. If Cuban had only known that, yes, Wade was the levitating wonder on the floor and the deserving M.V.P., but he was Stern’s chosen outreach star.
