The Dallas Mavericks' ongoing season of mediocrity and disappointment confirms a simple truth: As an owner, Mark Cuban is far superior to Jerry Jones.
Riddled in the Mavs' 11-8 record, in Dirk Nowitzki taking an early season break to get in shape and the less-than-spectacular additions of Lamar Odom, Vince Carter and Delonte West rests the genius of Cuban and the shortcomings of Jones.
Cuban, following a championship and the temptations it must have offered to overpay for Tyson Chandler, J.J. Barea and Caron Butler — that pressing itch to try to make one more run with Dirk and the guys — instead made the kind of gutsy move Jones hasn't had the stomach for with the Cowboys since the 1990s, if ever.
Cuban sacrificed one season to the prospect of mediocrity for the gamble that it will pay off with a long-term haul capable of remaking the Mavs into actual contenders for years to come.
His instincts that the Mavs could have been another version of the Boston Celtics — old, proud, over-the-hill and limping along with just enough false promise to ensure the playoffs but no championship — were right on target. Dirk taking four games and eight days off in the regular season because he's not in good enough shape — four games off while not injured! — is as clear a sign as you can get that Dallas needs a new superstar.
Nowitzki is the man, yes. But that no longer means his shoulders can carry the weight of this franchise's hopes into the future. It takes a visionary owner to be able to move past a star at the right time, a difficult dance the Indianapolis Colts' Jim Irsay may be trying to learn even now. It takes a brilliant one — and a lucky one — to pull it off while keeping that star in place as a selling point to the guy who's going to eventually take his place.
Cuban's plan is to use the cap space he'll have at his disposal, which came at the probable cost of not competing for a ring this season, to land Dwight Howard or Deron Williams during the next free-agent haul, and maybe both. What looked like a long shot a few months ago is, as the NBA picture comes into focus, starting to look instead like the move of a professional gambler — a mix of guts, intuition and luck.
Odom, Carter and West are all one-year rentals, assuming the Mavs don't pick up Odom's option. With the salary cap at about $58 million and likely to be in a similar range next season, and with the Mavs committed to only $41.4 million in salary, they can make a run at offering Howard a max deal if and when he becomes a free agent in July.
Use amnesty on Brendan Haywood or Shawn Marion to free up another $8 million or so, and they can do the same with D-Will.
Howard has the Magic flirting with keeping him, rolling their own dice and seeing what happens in the postseason and free agency. Williams has made it clear he's not going to re-sign with New Jersey unless Howard or some other star comes on board there, as well. The Clippers, behind the point guard-big man combo of Chris Paul and Blake Griffin, are underscoring just how fast a team with that kind of a talented tandem can rise.
With the Nets a mess, Cuban the players' owner
and Dirk a special kind of inducement, all of this makes Cuban look
like one thing: a gutsy, risk-taking, future-planning genius.
Which brings us to Jones, who, truth be told, is not.
Because we're also approaching yet another Super Bowl without the football team that made the 1990s its own. Hell, we're approaching another Super Bowl in which the Cowboys have won only one playoff game since 1996.
One.
Why?
Because Jerry Jones, in a league with more parity and a team with more juice and allure than the Mavericks, has never been able to sacrifice one season to build for the many, many that inevitably follow.
Cuban tasted that sweet draft of a championship and immediately began to plan for the next drink, regardless of whether or not he would have to wait a few years for a taste. Jones, thanks to Jimmy Johnson, got to be a glutton on the stuff and started acting like the next drink was the only one that would ever be available to him.
Future? Who needs to think about the future when all that matters, all that can ever matter, is the season right around the corner?
Jones, with that so-called philosophy pushing him ever onward, fired Chan Gailey after two years because he had no patience for the process. He never had a backup plan for Troy Aikman because he couldn't see past the next week, let alone the next season. He traded away the Cowboys' first-round picks for 2000 and 2001 (which became future Pro Bowl players Shaun Alexander and Koren Robinson) because he had to have Joey Galloway, now, today, the costs be damned!
When Jones backed into an actual quarterback in Tony Romo, he let the offensive line crumble — the most important part of a QB's success, and the most difficult thing for a man with no sense of the future or patience to build.
He never hired a GM — a source of many of these mistakes — because his
ego, his need for instant-gratification (of which short-term control at
the expense of long-term success is always a symptom) and his obsession
with now stopped him.
We have in Dallas — in a city of great wealth and ambition, in a city that has shaped much of the American sports landscape in nearly every facet, in a place that mastered this country's practice of rewarding winners — these two owners.
One, Mark Cuban, has surrendered this season to the very real possibility of disappointment and ugly basketball in exchange for a mere shot at long-term greatness. It remains a long shot, yes, but it's a long shot that every day seems to see its odds improve.
And the other, Jerry Jones, has since 1996 ensured that his team plod along on the spectrum somewhere between a five-win season (three of those) and a season marked by a playoff appearance that leads nowhere special (five of those).
That's 15 seasons of mediocrity. Mediocrity. The very thing, because he sacrificed this one season for the future, Cuban may have avoided for the next 10.
The Cowboys barely missed the playoffs this season. The Mavericks will probably get in and exit shortly thereafter. And in the reasons behind each is proof that Mark Cuban is as good an owner for his city as Jerry Jones is not.
You can follow Bill Reiter on Twitter or email him at foxsportsreiter@gmail.com.
