TANKING COMMENTS COST CUBAN
The NBA fined Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban US$600,000 Wednesday for comments about tanking during a podcast with Julius Erving. Commissioner Adam Silver said the fine was for “public statements detrimental to the NBA.”
Cuban said during the interview that he met recently with some of his players and told them “losing is our best option.” Cuban was trying to illustrate to Erving how he believes he is a transparent owner.
“I’m probably not supposed to say this, but I just had dinner with a bunch of our guys the other night,” Cuban said. “And here we are. We weren’t competing for the playoffs. I was like, ‘Look, losing is our best option.’ ”
“I earned it,” Cuban said when asked about the fine. “I got excited talking to Dr. J and said something I shouldn’t have.”
Responding Tuesday to a Sports Illustrated story alleging a “corrosive” workplace culture within his NBA team, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said he was “embarrassed” and vowed to “fix” the “problem.”
The lengthy story recounted numerous alleged instances of sexual harassment and abuse, as well as apparent indifference to them, by staffers and highly placed executives with the team. Based on claims made by former and current Mavericks employees, many of whom were women who requested not to be identified, plus events already on the record, SI’s story painted, as the magazine put it, “a picture of a corporate culture rife with misogyny and predatory sexual behaviour.”
In a statement issued shortly before SI published its article, Cuban’s organization emphasized that the former team president whose alleged behaviour is at the centre of the story “left the employment of the Mavericks nearly three years ago.” Terdema Ussery, who was hired as president three years before Cuban bought the team in 2000 and stayed on in the job until June 2015, was accused by one Mavs employee of predicting she was soon “going to get gangbanged,” and by another of repeatedly asking her to have sex with him and promising he’d leave his wife if she did so.
Saying that it “takes these allegations extremely seriously,” Cuban’s team announced it was hiring an outside law firm to conduct “a thorough and independent investigation.”