Mark Cuban: “I’m not so proud of the NBA.”

Memo to Dwight Howard, Stan Van Gundy, Phil Jackson, Matt Barnes, Rasheed Wallace and anyone else trying not to get fined while criticizing the referees:

Follow Mark Cuban’s lead. The Dallas Mavericks owner went with the use of code words rather than just come out and say the officiating sucked. Here, from the ESPNDallas:

“I’m proud of our guys, the way they kept on fighting back. I’m not so proud of the NBA. I’m not proud of my inability over the last 10 years to have the impact like I want to have, so I kind of feel like I owe fans an apology,” Cuban told ESPNDallas.com. “But, that’s just the way this business goes. But, congratulations to the Spurs.”

Just a note of clarification, a personal little pet peeve of mine in that quote, the line “Cuban told ESPN Dallas": Cuban did not tell that to ESPNDallas, he told it to every member of the media there in a big media scrum in the hallway. There were 20 or so media members there. It was broadcast on NBATV. The hot thing in journalism now is to take comments made to every available member of the media and say “as told to ProBasketballTalk” or whatever, but it’s misleading. It tries to sound exclusive when it’s not. Okay, stepping down off the soapbox now.

Cuban was smart, you just need to be able to read through the lines to get his meaning. He also refused to elaborate on his comments, not that he needed to. He was pissed about the officiating, but he has tried to work on that on a macro level. He has tried to change the way the officials are instructed, trained, monitored and assigned. So he put the blame on the big picture, not the night’s referees, and avoids a fine that way. While still saying the same thing.

Problem is, the referees were not the reason the Mavericks were down 22 in the first half. And that is why they lost the game, not the referees.