Mark Cuban is mad. He’s mad because an All-Star, all-defensive type player, decided to take his talents to Dallas, then changed his mind during the 11 day grace period the NBA allows called the Free Agency Moratorium. The Moratorium was created to enable a certain amount of time for Players to be exactly what they are called when they’re contract is over, free agents. FREE agents. It’s not a perfect system, but it is essentially supposed to allow a period where a player isn’t owned by any teams and can talk to teams without conflicting contracts.
So did Mark Cuban get screwed over? No doubt. It was a flaw in this system that wasn’t pointed out until the Deandre Jordan situation came up. It’s crazy how no one thought, ‘what if some one changes their mind’? Adam Silver will be receiving his phone calls from Mark Cuban, but Silver believes despite it being a flawed system, what better a system is there?
According to a transcript from Adam Silver’s discussion at the NBA Summer League (Via ProBasketballTalk):
“But on the other hand people have to remember one of the reasons for the moratorium was it used to be a guy could go from being a player under contract to all of a sudden at 12:01 signing with a new team. And people would say, ‘How in the world would that happen if he had been under contract and wasn’t supposed to be talking to other teams?’ So everyone agreed we needed a period of time in which more than either the player’s existing team or some team that somehow miraculously had had a conversation with him without having it directly — you needed an opportunity where other teams would have a chance to talk to that player. And now, what happened in this case was, of course, his own team — and I don’t know what the facts there are, and I’m sure we’ll ultimately spend more time looking into it, but at least as reported, DeAndre Jordan, through the moratorium period, reached out — that’s the report at least — and had second thoughts about leaving.
I will say it’s an imperfect system, there’s no question about it. The question is, ‘Is there a better system?’ And that’s something that the league office, and in discussion with our owners, we’re always looking to do things better. It so happens we have an owners’ meeting here in Las Vegas on Tuesday, we have a competition committee [Monday]. And there’s no doubt we’ll spend time talking about it to see just that, if there’s a better way. And on top of that, it also is part of our collective bargaining agreement as well. So even if we say, ‘Yeah, here’s a better way of doing it,’ we can’t unilaterally change it. It has to be changed through a collective bargaining process.”
With Silver hesitant to change or alter the Moratorium period, Cuban and other owners will likely try to change that when CBA negotiations pop up, but until then. Good luck.
