On Dec. 24, 2008, Mark Cuban wrote a post in his personal blog titled, “Why Pro Sports Need Newspapers.”

Cuban wrote at the time:

Professional Sports Leagues and teams, if we want to continue to connect to our local casual sports fan, needs to work with our local papers to try to keep them alive as long as possible.

More importantly, from a business perspective, because their customer base skews older, they dont use the net as a primary source of data, they have more disposable income to buy tickets and merchandise for themselves, their businesses and their families. In other words, their customers pay our bills.

Because of that, Cuban proposed that pro sports leagues actually employ media members:

My suggestion to the powers that be in the leagues I have spoken to is to have the leagues work together and create a “beatwriter co-operative” . We need to create a company that funds, depending on the size of the market and number of teams, 2 or more writers per market, to cover our teams in depth. The writers would cover multiple teams and multiple sports.

For the newspapers, its a way to get employees off the books, retain good writers that have a history with the papers and teams, and actually improve their publications. The leagues and teams depend on quantity and quality of coverage. We need to recognize the weaknesses of those we depend on and start addressing them today.

Cuban remains the first and only major league pro sports team owner I’ve seen place so much value on the media that he would suggest paying them himself. (For which he deserves credit, I might add.)

On August 5, 2010, Cuban wrote the following in the same blog about his bid to buy the Texas Rangers:

What I have learned in 11 years in the sports business is that the dumbest guys in the room are always the media guys. Some do a decent job of reporting, most just spew opinions.  And those opinions change more often than they brush their teeth. So what the media was saying was of zero impact or influence on what i was going to do. Listening to the media only increases your odds of failing at whatever you are doing.  So I ignore them.

That passage doesn’t exactly square with the value Cuban previously placed on sports media in his 2008 post.
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There’s been plenty of speculation that one of the reasons Mark Cuban traded Josh Howard to the Wizards last week was his concern about Howard’s partying. More specifically, Howard missing a recent game because he was hung over. Cuban addressed that on the Dan Patrick Show today:

Cuban also talked about former Maverick Josh Howard missing a game because he was hung over. Cuban said that he thought Howard could have done more to play that day.

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Yesterday the remaining remnants of 29-year-old Reunion Arena, the former home of the Dallas Mavericks, were imploded.

It wasn’t the typical fun-to-watch implosion, where demolition crews dynamited the entire structure. Instead, massive support columns were taken down one-by-one until the arena roof collapsed. Still pretty cool though.

Future plans for the site? The DALLAS MORNING NEWS reports, “a grassy field.” Hopefully there’s plans in the works to at the very least honor the site with some sort of plaque featuring an image of stached Brad Davis in his customary nuthuggers. Read more…

The Dallas Mavericks recently visited the Staples Center for a game against the Los Angeles Clippers, one that the Mavs won 93-84. Drew Gooden was in street clothes for the game, sidelined with a rib injury, which meant that he wasn’t as readily able to tune out hecklers as a player in the game would. And here we go.

(Not quite BFFs.)

Two partisan Clippers fans taunted Gooden and the rest of the Mavericks over the course of the night, using the old tried-and-true method of seeing a detail about someone and then yelling about it. “Dirk Nowitzki has a fake tan,” etc. etc., at a high volume. Apparently, either Gooden or an acquaintance allegedly pointed the two fans out after the game and called them “faggots.” Alert the presses? One of the fans, an actor with one memorable TV appearance, doesn’t mind if he does.

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When you wake up on Monday morning and see yourself all over the Internets looking like this, you know it’s not going to be a good week. Popeye Jones, who played for the Mavericks over two stints from 1993 to 2003, and is now an assistant coach with the team, was arrested and charged with DUI on Sunday.

Jones, it was reported, refused a breathalyzer test and “resisted arrest” before being taken into custody. But Richardson, Texas police say that his resisting was so full of Fail that they’re not even going to charge him with that. Apparently losing one’s balance and hitting the pavement face first is punishment enough. Read more…

Lakers gacked against the Mavericks last night, not that anyone will remember the game result in a few weeks.

But Shannon Brown, for the second time already this season, did give us a reason to mark Halloween Eve, 2009. Read more…

Quick: who’s #4 on the Utah Jazz’s all-time list of most games played? It goes John Stockton, Kark Malone, Mark Eaton, and… well, you probably already read the headline and figured it out. It’s one of the largest, slowest players in NBA history: the one, the only Greg Ostertag!

(Awww, why are the glacial white guys playing against each other? They should be teaming up! When are we going to stop doing this to each other?)

We bring him up not because we merely like celebrating the dinosaurs of the league - though we do enjoy that - but because the Ostertag Era may not be over just yet. Despite not having played in years (and not having been especially productive while actually playing), Ostertag’s got his eyes on a comeback, right in his native land of Texas.

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One of the stranger aspects of the Dirk Nowitzki/Cristal Taylor saga - aside from the fact that she was engaged to an NBA player until he ran a background check on her and found more red flags than Tienanmen Square - has been the media’s willingness to accept her claims, even as she’s being held on suspicion of fraud.

(Smile, Dirk! But not like that, please. Never like that.)

So when, for example, Taylor claimed to be pregnant, there were plenty of tuts and moans to go around when Nowitzki essentially washed his hands of her. See the POST, HUFFINGTON, for example. The actual foolish behavior, though, would be having taken Taylor at her word.

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You remember Cristal Taylor — Dirk Nowitzki’s ex-fiance, who says that she’s pregnant with his child — yeah, that one. She was sentenced to five years in prison this morning in a court in St. Charles, Missouri, on a 12-year-old forgery and theft case.

It’s never a good sign in a relationship when the man you want to marry (allegedly) hires investigators and turns you in, having you arrested in his own house. That happened in May, and now the 38-year-old St. Louis-area native is going to the Graybar Hotel for a number of transgressions, mostly forgery and writing bad checks.

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It’s been well-known that Mark Cuban is an unconventional owner whose fandom and fervency borders on obsessive. That’s fine, and a welcome respite from the Donald Sterlings of professional sports, but it becomes problematic when he finds himself rewriting the record books on fines levied by the league.

(And now there’s so many new layers of poetic justice in this.)

It also appears that the enmity that sometimes boils over has also targeted former Mavs coach (and current Warriors head honcho) Don Nelson. At stake is deferred compensation that Cuban, well, just isn’t going to pay, judges’ rulings be damned.

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