The wallet of the Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is about to be a bit lighter.
The N.B.A. said Friday that it has fined Cuban $500,000 for “his public criticism and detrimental conduct regarding N.B.A. officiating” after his team’s Feb. 22 loss to the Atlanta Hawks. The N.B.A. also denied the Mavericks’ protest of the game, which, if granted, would have required the teams to replay the final seconds.
The protest came after the referees allowed a Hawks basket to count even though it was scored after a play had been blown dead late in the fourth quarter. Mavericks forward Dorian Finney-Smith was whistled for goaltending after blocking a layup attempt by Atlanta’s Trae Young on the play. But as that happened, John Collins, a Hawks forward, rebounded Young’s blocked shot and scored.
The problem was the referees, upon review, deemed the whistle inadvertent, because Finney-Smith did not commit goaltending. They allowed Collins’s basket to stand, even though it came after the whistle.
Cuban was furious after the game and showed it on Twitter, questioning how the officials could have come to their decision.
He also confronted officials on the court, “shaking his head and directing comments toward them,” according to the league’s statement. Days later, Cuban said during a Sirius XM interview that he thought the Mavericks had “a really good chance” of winning the protest.
The league, in its statement on Friday, said it determined “that the whistle began to sound one-fifteenth of a second before Collins gained possession of the ball.”
It added: “For these reasons, Commissioner Silver found that the extraordinary remedy of granting a game protest and replaying the last portion of a completed game was not warranted.”
Only four protests in league history — out of 40 or so publicly known cases — have been successful. And only one has led to a replayed game in the last four decades.
That was in 2007, when Shaquille O’Neal, then playing for the Miami Heat, was incorrectly fouled out of the game against Atlanta. Miami won its protest but lost the game anyway when the final 51.9 seconds were replayed.
The $500,000 fine for Cuban, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, was the second largest known fine of his tenure as an N.B.A. owner. His highest N.B.A. fine was $600,000, for comments he made to Julius Erving on a podcast in 2018 extolling the virtues of losing games on purpose.
Since acquiring the Mavericks in 2000, Cuban has been assessed fines totaling $3,115,000. That tally does not include the $10 million donation Cuban was said to have made to women’s groups in the wake of his team’s sexual harassment scandal in 2018.
Source: Basketball - nytimes.com
