Mark Cuban

Art Thompson III has quite the interesting scoop for us on his OCR Blog.  Apparently Mark Cuban was so impressed with Clipper Darrell at last week's game that he has offered Darrell a gig as, I suppose, Maverick Darrell.  Says Darrell, "He offered me a job in Dallas, to do the same thing I do for the Clippers.  He came up to me at the (Jan. 12) game and told me that he loved what I do. That shocked me."

Now that's the kind of innovative thinking that Mark Cuban brings to the NBA.  Let's poach vocal fans from other teams and have them be vocal fans for our team!  The fact that Darrell is a Clippers fan as opposed to a Mavericks fan should not in anyway impact this negotiation.  A paid cheerleader sitting in the stands is a paid cheerleader sitting in the stands, and who wouldn't just love that?

Here's an idea Mark.  Maybe, rather than relocating a lifelong Angelino to the Big D, you could hold auditions for existing Mavericks fans with, I dunno, a pre-existing interest in your team?  You need someone with a loud voice.  Maybe you could sew up a nice shiny suit for him or her.

Have I ranted about Mark Cuban on this blog before?  I haven't?  Well, that doesn't seem right.

Here's the thing:  when Mark Cuban goes on one of his 'If I ran my businesses the way David Stern runs the NBA' screeds it's about the most disingenuous load of crap imaginable.  What businesses?  You mean Broadcast.com?  Or the one that makes high tech toilets?  Broadcast.com was started by Cuban's college roommate.  Cuban was involved for a couple of years and it was sold to Yahoo! at the very top of the bubble.  Oh, good job negotiating those unrestricted Yahoo! shares in the deal.  Unlike the 100 or so paper millionaires from Broadcast who never saw a dime from the sale before the dotcom bubble burst, Cuban was able to cash out and buy a basketball team and a jet.  Today, Broadcast.com is such an integral part of Yahoo! that it... oh wait, there's really nothing left of Broadcast.com.

($5.7B for Broadcast.com certainly ranks in my top three of the most ludicrous transactions of that era.  The IPO of Priceline certainly rates up there, but in that case at least it was just crazy investors making imaginary money.  In the case of Broadcast, supposedly intelligent people at Yahoo! had to be convinced that it was worth $5.7B.  Here's the thing:  Broadcast.com amounted to a URL, an idea, and some broadcast rights.  The URL would be irrelevant to Yahoo!, the idea was fair game, and the broadcast rights would come up for bid again.  So where's the $5.7B?  Of course, since it was all in Yahoo! stock which was almost equally overvalued, it hardly mattered to Yahoo!  Give credit to Cuban for getting those unrestricted shares and cashing out at the right time.  The other transaction in my top three is AOL/Time Warner.  Don't get me started on that one.)

For Mark Cuban to view himself as anything other than what he is (an incredibly lucky person who was in the right place at the right time) is the very height of arrogance.  

I hope Darrell starts the wave while Nowitzki is shooting a free throw.