To be sure, the record will show that the Mavericks played 82 regular season games, although many fans will say the Mark Cuban-owned club played in only 80. That’s not just fans being blindly enraged about the head-scratching end to the season. The NBA seems to agree with the notion the Mavericks likely gave up before they should have.
On Saturday, April 8, just after 2 p.m. Dallas Morning News reporter Brand Townsend tweeted a report that the NBA had opened an investigation into the Mavericks’ “apparent tanking,” as it related to Friday night’s anemic lineup.
Townsend reported: “‘The NBA commenced an investigation today into the facts and circumstances surrounding the Dallas Mavericks’ roster decisions and game conduct with respect to last night’s Chicago Bulls-Mavericks game, including the motivation behind those actions,’ NBA spokesman Mike Bass said.”
A couple of hours after that announcement, the Mavs flushed away any plausible deniability when the team released its injury report for Sunday’s game. Not only would the controversial, recently acquired star Kyrie Irving be unavailable to play again on Sunday, as he had been on Friday night, but fellow Friday sitters Josh Green and Maxi Kleber would also be wearing street clothes on the bench again in addition to regular contributors Reggie Bullock and Tim Hardaway Jr.
Joining the benchwarmers on Sunday was the team’s all-world icon, Luka Doncic, who had managed to play for only one quarter on Friday before being pulled from action. It didn’t require an insider’s keen eye to note that what the Mavericks were doing was not only highly unusual, but just plain obvious.
“I couldn’t believe what an s-show this season had become,” said Craig Miller, co-host of the Dunham and Miller morning show on 1310 The Ticket during Monday morning’s broadcast. “What a weird and bizarre ending to this season it was. To tank, you should do so in a subtle way that doesn’t create an NBA investigation… This organization does not know which way is up.”
Now that the offseason has begun, the team faces what might be its most pivotal period in some time. Last week Cuban told reporters that Jason Kidd would be the team’s head coach next season, but the undecided contractual fate of Irving is sure to be a sticking point with a number of implications, depending on whether he stays or leaves.“I couldn’t believe what an s-show this season had become.” – Craig Miller, 1310 The Ticket
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If talk of Cuban and the Mavericks tanking sounds familiar, it should. In 2018, Cuban was fined $600,000 for comments he made on a podcast about the virtues of his team not putting its best foot forward if it meant better prospects for obtaining higher draft picks.
When speaking to NBA legend Julius “Dr. J” Irving, Cuban reportedly said, “I’m probably not supposed to say this, but I just had dinner with a bunch of our guys the other night, and here we are. We weren’t competing for the playoffs. I was like, ‘Look, losing is our best option.’”
In 2018 the Mavericks ended up missing the playoffs with a pitiful 24-58 record. A few months later the Mavs would find themselves with the fifth pick in the NBA draft, which they traded to the Atlanta Hawks for the third pick. Either spot would’ve been the highest pick in the draft the team had had in ages. The prize for being so bad that season, however, was getting to draft Doncic after he had been the MVP of the Spanish pro basketball league.
The connective thread between Cuban’s 2018 comments on tanking and the way his team ended its 2023 season is clear to see. He said the quiet part out loud. It might be honest in a way, but it’s an honest slap in the face of the fans, too. Some have called the lineup gymnastics “pragmatic,” and up to a point, there’s an argument to be made for that.
But this year’s team wasn’t like the 2018 squad, which finished far below the playoff cut-off line. This year’s team was in a position to make the playoffs, even if it was only for a spot in the play-in tournament. Their loss to Chicago eliminated them in game 81. Last year, the Mavericks made a shocking run to the Western Conference Finals. To be fair, that roster was more well-rounded than this year’s, but with a healthy Doncic and Irving, the Mavericks didn’t even give the most explosive one-two punch in team history a chance to surprise anyone.
The Dallas Mavericks are officially tanking to try to keep the 10th pick. https://t.co/etbXvM4jo6
— Grant Afseth (@GrantAfseth) April 7, 2023
Team owners, general managers and coaches who are convinced they’ll have a job the next season have reason to look ahead. The idea of tanking to improve draft position isn’t new. There’s a good reason tanking is often a hot topic of discussion near the end of any professional sports league’s season. It happens. We get it. If tanking is done with a modicum of finesse and consideration, it's safe to say that it goes unnoticed by the fans who are paying money for tickets and taking time out of their schedules to watch the games.
Publicly waving the white flag with games left in the season in such a brazenly hubristic manner should not be credited as something the powers-that-be are doing to serve the fans. Miller summed up just how horrendous this latest tanking controversy makes the Mavericks look.
“Everyone likes to talk about how dysfunctional the [Dallas] Cowboys are,” Miller continued on his broadcast. “It’s times ten with the Mavericks and this proves it.”
