Aside from his $3 billion net worth, Mark Cuban is as “every man” as the NBA’s ownership gets.
He attends Mavericks games in t-shirts, screams at the referees and could easily be confused for your 44-year-old, next-door neighbor.
Now — in an interview with ESPN — Cuban again aligned himself the common man by lambasting the current state of the NCAA and college basketball.
Cuban claims that by refusing to shorten college’s 35 second shot clock, the NCAA is not only making games too boring for casual fans to watch, but also poorly preparing players to make the jump to the pros.
If they want to keep kids in school and keep them from being pro players, they’re doing it the exact right way by having the 35-second shot clock and having the game look and officiated the way it is. Just because kids don’t know how to play a full game of basketball.
You’ve got three kids passing on the perimeter. With 10 seconds on the shot clock, they try to make something happen and two other kids stand around. They don’t look for anything and then run back on defense, so there’s no transition game because two out of five or three out of five or in some cases four out of five kids aren’t involved in the play.
It’s uglier than ugly, and it’s evidenced by the scoring going down. When the NBA went through that, we changed things.
It’s horrible. It’s ridiculous. It’s worse than high school. You’ve got 20 to 25 seconds of passing on the perimeter and then somebody goes and tries to make a play and do something stupid, and scoring’s gone down.
The referees couldn’t manage a White Castle. Seriously, the college game is more physical than the NBA game, and the variation in how it’s called from game to game [is a problem]. Hell, they don’t even have standards on balls. They use different balls. One team’s got one ball, the other team’s got another ball. There are so many things that are ridiculous.
I 100% agree with Cuban. I am a HUGE college basketball fan — Rah, Rah Carolina! — but the current pace of the game is killing the sport, and it’s about time someone from the league called out the NCAA.
Preach, Cubes.
