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As relationships soured with a couple of head coaches, Mark Cuban has been accused of being a meddlesome owner at times over the years. That’s one term being used to describe Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadive after the stunning decision to fire coach Michael Malone a quarter of the way into his second season despite drastic improvement by the team. That decision has been widely criticized, including by Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle, as the president of the NBA’s coaches association called it “disappointing” and pointed out how drastically the Kings’ culture changed for the better during Malone’s tenure. “It’s not so much meddling and hands-on. That’s not the issue,” Cuban said. “The hardest thing in professional sports for an owner is hiring a coach. Period, end of story. I’ve said that a dozen times. The second hardest thing is hiring a general manager because there’s no template. No one does bad interviews because they’re all quality just to get there. I mean, it’s just not easy. “After that, it’s really hard to turn off some of your basic business instincts. I would always try to push myself to learn more and get involved on the business side more to kind of take all that anxiety.” In regard to basketball decisions, Cuban took an approach that is the polar opposite of Ranadive’s after purchasing the Mavs almost 15 years ago. He intentionally didn’t make any major decisions despite public pressure to fire coach Don Nelson and clean house. “I really tried to learn,” Cuban said. “That’s why I didn’t make any changes when I first got there on the basketball side, because I wasn’t smart enough to know where to go or what changes to make. I feel [Ranadive’s] pain. It’s not easy. It is not easy. And you make mistakes.” Cuban, who has essentially acted as the Mavs’ general manager since his divorce from Nelson, has made plenty of personnel mistakes over the years. His track record of hiring coaches, however, is pretty impressive. Nelson oversaw the Mavs morphing from an NBA punchline to a perennial Western Conference contender after Cuban stuck with him. The team went to the Finals in Avery Johnson’s first full season as a coach. And Carlisle, who has the second-longest current tenure among NBA head coaches, coached the Mavs to a title. Seven years into their relationship, there have been so signs of friction between Cuban and Carlisle. One reason is because Carlisle has consistently had an open mind to Cuban’s commitment to analytics instead of viewing it as meddling. It also probably helps that Cuban has mellowed considerably over the years, although he still says he lives and dies with every Mavs possession. “As an owner, in business you’re used to everything is a variable that reflects on the decisions that you have made,” Cuban said. “So one loss that you’re supposed to win, one win that you’re supposed to lose, a guy plays a certain way when everybody you talked to said it was supposed to be Y and he’s X ... “In business, when there’s diversion from your expectation, your mind is to immediately fix it. That’s why, like when I first got in, I took it all out on the refs because if anything the rulebook was supposed to be the rulebook. That’s the one necessary constant. And I still sometimes take it out on the refs.” Better the refs than his coach.
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