It's wonderful to be rich. I think we were all aware of that prior to Wednesday afternoon, but when Mavericks owner Mark Cuban bought his way out of trouble and avoided any kind of suspension from the NBA despite the overwhelming evidence of his organization having been out of control for two decades, it hit home.
No suspension. Nothing. Not a game.
Cuban will pay $10 million to a variety of programs dealing with women in the workplace and domestic violence. It's a big check but one that any NBA owner can write without changing his plans for dinner. And Cuban's performance on ESPN's "The Jump" during an aggressive interview from host Rachel Nichols should have given the NBA all sorts of reasons to create a more painful solution for the Mavs owner, considering the pain so many women endured for years while working for his club.
Cuban repeatedly acknowledged the mistakes he had made, starting with his failure to examine or scrutinize his CEO Terdema Ussery when he bought the club in 2000. Ussery had been under investigation by the Mavericks for sexual harassment in 1998. I wrote about it. Brad Townsend wrote about it. Others wrote and talked about it. Somehow Cuban claims he never heard of it and didn't know about it when he bought the club.
"Should I have done due diligence and should they have disclosed it? Yes," Cuban said. "In hindsight, I was just excited to buy the Mavs."
The manner in which Cuban allowed Chris Hyde, a team employee, to survive numerous reports of misconduct as well as former mavs.com beat writer Earl Sneed, involved in two domestic violence incidents (one of them with a team employee) remains appalling. And Cuban offers no excuses in either case.
"In hindsight, it was stupid on my part. It's ridiculous," Cuban said. "If someone showed me this from another company, I'd say that you couldn't make a bigger mistake."
This from the guy on Shark Tank, the expert on entrepreneurship and how to run a company.
With all of these admissions from Cuban, how did the NBA arrive at the position that a fine was enough? Ignorance is rarely a useful defense. It doesn't work for college coaches, so how can it be good enough for the owner of an NBA franchise?
One can hope that the millions will do some good on any number of fronts. A penalty to the basketball team (loss of a draft pick) would have hurt Cuban the most but ultimately would have been unfair to a team that had nothing to do with the business office.
So suspending Cuban for multiple games was the best way to let the embarrassment linger, to drive home the point that NBA owners cannot be this removed from their own workplace.
The NBA unfortunately took a pass.
