Mark Cuban and Steve Ballmer ‘cleared the air’ over the DeAndre Jordan fiasco
Mark Cuban was pretty heated after DeAndre Jordan backed out of his verbal agreement to join the Dallas Mavericks in free agency so that he could return to the Los Angeles Clippers in a stunning move that drastically changed the short- and long-term competitive outlooks of both franchises. He wasn’t the only one — Mavericks forward Chandler Parsons, who had been “wooing and partying with Jordan for weeks in an elaborate, ‘Entourage’-style recruiting trip,” was also quite steamed — but the billionaire Mavericks owner was very publicly disappointed by Jordan’s communication-free about-face, telling Yahoo Sports NBA columnist Marc J. Spears that he didn’t “even remember [Jordan’s] name.”
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Jordan issued a public apology to Cuban and the Mavericks two days after reversing course and re-upping with the Clips; Cuban wasn’t particularly interested. Apparently, things went a bit better when Cuban came face-to-face with Clippers owner Steve Ballmer in Las Vegas at the NBA’s Board of Governors meetings.
Cuban discussed the meeting via Cyber Dust, the private messaging application he launched that deletes your text posts 24 seconds after you publish them. Mike Leslie of Dallas/Fort Worth ABC affiliate WFAA-TV captured them before they disappeared:
More Cyberdusting from Mark Cuban. Says he spoke with Steve Ballmer yesterday. Says they’ve cleared the air. #Mavs pic.twitter.com/YYsQ3zcGtY
— Mike Leslie (@MikeLeslieWFAA) July 15, 2015
Hey Mavs fans. So I had a nice conversation with Steve Ballmer, owner of the Clippers yesterday during our NBA meetings.
It started off more than a little frigid, but we both cleared the air on a few things.
I told him exactly what I told other owners. I didn’t have a problem with his hail Mary approach to keeping a player. I understood why they did it. And even how they did it. They got their player back. End of story.
There are still a few unresolved issues that the NBA will have to work through but one I don’t feel is an issue is the moratorium.
Nothing that happened with this deal was the result of the moratorium
The thing about the NBA is that you don’t know which deals are the good deals and which arrows you avoided till you start playing the games.
My guess is that we open the season against the Clippers. That’s when the real fun begins
+letsgomavs
Dust On !
I can’t tell if I want “Dust On !” to be placed inside a sturdy and fast rocket and blasted directly into the sun, or to become the official sign-off of every single basketball fan in the world. Very tough to say at this point.
It was never likely that the NBA would do away with the moratorium entirely. For one thing, it’s not clear if the league and the National Basketball Players Association, the union that represents NBA players, could finish their audit of the league’s revenues from the previous fiscal year — which ends on June 30 — by the 30th to be able to officially set the salary cap and luxury tax lines for the subsequent season, which is the stated point for the week-plus period between the start of the new league year on July 1 and the date on which agreements can be officially finalized and signed.
For another, the built-in period during which nothing can really happen gives teams, agents and players time to hold meetings, make pitches, line up myriad plans of attack and generate intrigue; maybe the league doesn’t necessarily like a high-profile player reneging on a handshake deal, but it does like all the attention and discussion that comes with players meeting with different teams, including surprising ones. Even if it doesn’t amount to much more than smoke, the horse race element of it matters.
Given the likelihood of the league wanting some version of the moratorium around, some folks have suggested tightening it up, limiting the turnaround time on agreements and thus perhaps making it less likely that such a plate-shifting change could take place.
“I think there was some discussion on whether the moratorium should be a bit shorter,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told reporters on Tuesday, according to Spears. “It’s an imperfect system and we think we are finding the right balance between teams having the opportunity to talk to players when they become free agents and creating certainty at some point when contracts are entered into.”
Silver acknowledged that the circus that surrounded Jordan’s change of heart, replete with emojis and chock full of social media intrigue, might not necessarily have been the NBA’s finest hour.
“From a personal standpoint, it’s not a great look,” Silver said. “It’s not what we want to see happen in the moratorium period. It wasn’t created so players could enter into in essence oral agreements only to have those agreements superseded by binding agreements. Of course, under our collective bargaining agreement, there is no disputing that only a signed agreement is a binding one when the moratorium starts. I don’t think anybody is questioning that. But there was a breakdown in the system.”
The commissioner remains open to considering changes — at this latest round of BoG meetings, “nobody had a great idea, frankly, in terms of how to change it,” he said — and praised Cuban for how he’s handled the aftermath of the disappointment, inking shooting guard Wesley Matthews, swinging a trade for center Zaza Pachulia and picking up former All-Star point guard Deron Williams after the Brooklyn Nets bought out the final two years of his contract.
“I will say that I think Mark Cuban has moved on,” Silver said. “He’s an extraordinarily competitive guy and has done a fantastic job managing his team over the years, and he’ll continue to be competitive.”
Cuban and Ballmer, by the sounds of things, have indeed moved on. Whether Ballmer has plans to “Dust On !,” however,” remains unclear.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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