08-25-2005, 07:36 AM
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#1 (permalink)
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Administrator 12/02--7/07
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: That other place and now here sometimes
Age: 42
Posts: 35,477
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OT: Cuban on the reasoning behind the Finley Cut and learning to play the FA game
The Whole Blog Entry -- Good Read, as always
Quote:
In the NBA when a player is signed to a contract, the business side is downplayed. Everyone is happy. Everyone knows there is an incredible amount of risk taken, but its a time to celebrate and ignore what could go wrong. All is right in the world.
When teams have to release a player, the NBA becomes a business and all involved say just that. Its just a business and we all understand that these things happen. But its not true. The NBA is never just a business. It’s always business. It’s always personal. All good businesses are personal. The best businesses are very personal.
Creating a close connection to those you do business with has its many risks, rewards and consequences. There are few things in business i have encountered that are more difficult than firing someone, particularly if that someone has always been, or has become a friend. On the flipside, I have been rewarded with many friends
Michael Finley is one of those people I am proud to call my friend. Releasing Fin last night was one of the hardest things I have had to do as owner of the Mavs. (Trading Erik Strickland was probably the hardest. Strick did more to help me my first year than anyone.). Even more difficult than releasing Mike was having the conversations with him about what our options were
The model for success in the NBA has changed over the past 6 years I have been in the league. When I first got to the Mavs, there was no luxury tax, revenues from TV and the league went up every year, as did the salary cap. That changed dramatically with the leagues new TV deal and it changed even further with this years new collective bargaining agreement. Rather than an environment where salaries could go up because the cap and revenues were going up, we entered an environment where trades were made almost exclusively for financial reasons and rarely for basketball skill reasons.
The Mavs tried to take advantage of the situation. When the annual league revenue increases stopped and a luxury tax loomed, teams adjusted their financial profiles. To get under the tax threshold, they offered good players packaged with horrible contracts. We took them. We hoped the talent would get us a championship before the number of bad contracts we took on in trades caught up with us.
It didn’t happen
Over the past year we have done our best to try to “rebuild” and still be in a position to win a championship. We have always been good at developing young players. We work hard to give them personal attention and skills development. We are working to improve it even further and have completely upgraded our development programs this summer.
We are also significantly changing how we scout NBA players. It has become more organized, structured and planned rather than “gut feel”. We have a coach who is far more systematic in his approach to both
More importantly we have gone from just trying to acquire talent to have assets that in turn might be traded for better talent, to making sure we have players that fill a role for Coach Johnson’s vision of the team. Today, and for the future with young players that we can develop to fill those roles on future Mavs teams.
Which brings us back to Mike. Under the new CBA, the amount of money we would be able to save by waiving Mike, and invoking the amnesty provision, when combined with some financial clauses in the way his contract was structured and the money that could be returned as part of the NBA set off contract provisions, could put our cash savings in the next 3 years at more than 90mm dollars. That’s a lot of money.
Now I would be shocked if we are able to realize all of that and stay under the tax amount, but even saving that much money in essence gives us a “do over” in terms of financial flexibility when it comes to signing new players. It gives me a chance to recover from the mistakes I made.
Are we going to get back in the business of taking on bad contracts to get a single player — no. Will we consider trading short term contracts for longer, more expensive players — yes. If it makes basketball sense and doesnt inhibit our future. The difference going forward today vs the past is that Avery and Donnie are putting in programs and structure that will allow us to better evaluate players and choose those that put our team in the best position to succeed. We never did that in the past.
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OT: Cuban on the reasoning behind the Finley Cut and learning to play the FA game
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