It feels like every year Mark Cuban is asked about the greatest regret of his life, he reverts to the time when he let Steve Nash leave the Dallas Mavericks. It’s been two decades since that fateful day, and yet, the internet is littered with the same story, told in different words, of course, with the exception of the reference to Mike Bibby.
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This time, he appeared on The Arena, primarily talking about not being a majority stakeholder in the Dallas Mavericks and hating the Luka Doncic trade to the LA Lakers. So much so, that while claiming to love the Slovenian star, Cuban maintains he would love to see him go 0-82 down with the team. No exceptions.
By his own admission, he regretted not having the right to make the final call on on-court decisions anymore and evidently disliked the Luka trade, but not more than letting Nash go back in the day, courtesy of not wanting to pay him more.
“That season, he had played about 29 minutes a game. And the doctors were saying, he’s got all these orthopedic issues and this and that. And we made him a good offer, and I will never forget it because down in my office at the arena, I still have my calendar from the very moment when I was taking notes when I was talking to Steve,” he began.
“Kudos to Steve because he called me back and said, ‘Hey, they gave me Mike Bibby money, right? And we had offered him like 13 or whatever.’ Mike Bibby money back then was like 16. I was like, ‘This is what we are sticking at, Steve. We want you to come back,'” Cuban recalled.
Cuban continued with the story, “But to make it all work, remember back then the cap would go down in years. It wasn’t always going straight up like that. There were years where it would go up 2, down 4 … And that made it tougher to pay up, and so that probably was my biggest mistake.”
Unfortunately for Cuban, shortly after Nash left the Mavs, the NBA added a hand-checking rule to the game to make scoring easier and the game more entertaining for a larger audience.
It prevented defenders from using their hands and forearms to stop offensive players. But with that gone, players like Nash found it rather convenient to run to the basket and create scoring opportunities. Nash would notably also go on to win two MVP awards, likely because of the rule change.
“They changed the rules a lot. Because the games were like 80-75 back then. And I remember being at the board of governors’ meeting and people are freaked out, right? The game is too boring, it’s too slow. It’s not open. It’s really physical, and we got 80-75 games where squads would go 6 minutes without scoring a point. It was ugly,” Cuban admitted.
It certainly seems to have worked out. The NBA has more viewership than ever before, and it makes more money than anybody could have imagined back in the day, when advertisers were scared of braids and tattoos on players!
