Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban lashes out at NBA for the White House trip snub
It seems that at the end of the Lockout, the NBA was so eager to get the shortened season rolling, that they forgot to accommodate a trip to White House for the champions Dallas Mavericks in the jam packed schedule. The trip is
a privilege that the champions of the four major American sports leagues, including NBA, Major League Baseball (MLB), National Football League (NFL) and National Hockey League (NHL), enjoy.
The snub did not go down well with the Mavs owner Mark Cuban and apparently he has arranged the meeting with the US President Barrack Obama all on his own. In a scathing attack on the NBA, Cuban revealed that he didn’t contact
the league to complain and took the matter into his own hands;
"There's no point in calling them. It's bull---- by the league not to schedule it," Cuban said. "I figured I'd do it myself since the league wasn't smart enough to figure it out. How can you be that stupid? All you've got to do
is when you're putting in the scheduling software, say Dallas at Washington, yes. They managed to get Dallas and Miami and all the games set on certain days."
The NBA however has a totally different narrative about the whole episode. According to spokesman Mike Bass,
"Our jurisdiction doesn't extend to scheduling the president, and scheduling the Mavericks against the Wizards would have been no guarantee that the president would be in town and available,".
He also intimated that once the availability of the president was confirmed on January 9, the league coordinated with the Mavs for setting up the meet.
The trip to the White House is usually arranged when the champions are in or around Washington DC, but there is no such trip scheduled for the Mavericks this season and Cuban insisted that it was blunder on NBA’s side;
"It doesn't change the fact that they didn't (schedule) a game in DC for us," Cuban wrote in an email to The Associated Press (AP). "Given the compressed schedule it should have been more of a priority because they knew better
than any of us how few days off we would have to do something."
The Mavs will now board a Sunday flight to DC after taking on the New Orleans Hornets on Saturday, before meeting the president on Monday.
Tags: