Mark Cuban is known for many things. He’s the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, the star of “Shark Tanks,” and an outspoken voice in the realm of politics.
But in the NBA world, he’s known most for his antics towards officials. For years, the owner of one of the league’s biggest market teams has been fined for yelling at officials or publicly defaming them in interviews and press conferences.
As it turns out, NBA officials don’t like that. In a new report from Adrian Wojnarowski of The Vertical, the referees have filed a report with the NBA in which they criticize the league for giving Cuban “undue influence” over how they are managed.
In a recent letter to Byron Spruell, the NBA’s president of league operations, NBRA general counsel Lee Seham outlined what the union considers to be a lengthy pattern of documented violations by Cuban of the NBA constitution and “undue influence of the league’s management of its officials.”
“We consider the threat to the integrity of NBA basketball presented by Mr. Cuban’s misconduct to be real and growing,” Seham wrote on Dec. 9.
[…]In response to the league rejecting Seham’s premise that Cuban holds an “inappropriate influence” over referee employment decisions, the union’s general counsel responded: “No other owner has communicated to our members with such force that he exercises control over their careers. He has communicated that he played a pivotal role in the termination of Kevin Fehr, a referee who met league performance standards. He has communicated to an NBRA board member, during contract negotiations, that the referees would continue to be at-will employees. He has told a referee, during a game, that he follows that referee’s game reports.”
The report also includes numerous examples of Cuban swearing out officials in the middle of games.
This is obviously a fairly serious claim and Cuban addressed it in an e-mail to the Vertical which in part read:
“To suggest I have influence is to suggest that the NBA officials can be influenced,” Cuban told The Vertical in an email. “If an official can be influenced by pressure from anyone, they should not be in the NBA. I don’t believe they can be influenced. As far as my influence on employment, several years ago I sent a list to the NBA of officials who had been NBA officials for more than a decade and never made the playoffs.”
It will be interesting to see if the NBA will make any changes. Mark Cuban has been at this for years now so it’s hard to see it happening. That said, an official complaint from referees (who have other gripes, including the NBA’s L2M reports) could be the catalyst to change.
