2021-2022 ROSTER TALK: [ARCHIVED]

[Not an evil robot]

I think this is where we diverge. 

I see this as evidence not of Cuban-as-GM but of Donnie failing in his role as president. I see how you come to your conclusion, better than I have in the past, but from my seat my intuition still points to a different conclusion. 


Are you able to connect me to anything that documents Cuban complaining about not being able to get trades done? (I know if that was a decade ago that may be a hard ask, I just don't remember seeing anything like that)


One final thought:

There might be a world where we are both right since this spans like two decades of time). Maybe there were different periods of time where both of these happened. Maybe MC was truly the GM for stretches of time (like you are saying) while other stretches he was much less engaged and Donnie was supposed to be running things (but not doing so adequately). Just a thought.

These conversations are difficult to “watch”. Hard to ask this in a way that doesn’t sound condescending, but have you had much exposure to leadership teams professionally? You seem to have a habit of connecting the reported dots in such an unintuitive way that, while possible, airballs Occam’s Razor.

Take the reported confusion around who to discuss trades with. Nelson was only one of the people apparently negotiating, meaning others were making calls as well (say, Voulgaris). Were those others reporting Nelson, meaning he had leverage to stop them? I believe we have confirmation that those others reported directly to Cuban. If so, that’s on our illustrious owner and an awful organizational structure that he’s ultimately accountable for.

We can bicker on whether Cuban was really the GM or argue the semantics of whether he was too involved or not enough, but the bottom line is that there are some very basic management decisions on the structure of the organization which were, ahem, “highly unconventional”. There’s no excuse to get the simple things wrong (like roles & responsibilities, decision making power, etc.) when you’re bringing in NBA kind of revenue.

Just to be clear, I’m not slating Cuban for evaluating talent poorly (although I’m not defending him either). Talent evaluation is incredibly hard, despite fans’ self-confidence. But there are non-basketball red flags that came out in the summer departures that scream either “I don’t know what I’m doing” or “I’m smarter than everyone else”. It kills me to see some section of Mavs fans carrying his water on the unforced errors he’s made purely on simple business stuff. For what it’s worth, there are a lot of signs Cuban is a classic founder-CEO archetype that is great at disruption/growth but utterly out of his depth at running a large successful business. Usually those guys eventually step aside or crash their ego-ship into a hubris iceberg.