Q&A: Mark Cuban

Posted by Unknown on Sunday, July 22, 2012 with 4 comments
During a recent NBA TV telecast, Mark Cuban answered the following questions when it came to the Dallas Mavericks' off season.


On the acquisition of point guard Darren Collison and the signings of free agent center Chris Kaman and forward Elton Brand: 
“You can’t replace Jason Kidd. There’s just no way. But at the same time, there’s going to be a lot of things we couldn’t do. You know, ‘J’ could take over a game defensively and he could help us get where we needed to go, but he was just a spot-up shooter. Now, we’ve got a lot of people who are going to force people to really defend us.
“(Kaman and Brand) takes a lot of pressure off of Dirk. ”Last year, you didn’t really have to defend our 5 position. You didn’t have to defend our point guard position. Now you’re going to have to defend all five, and that’s going to make life a little bit easier.”
The signing of guard O.J. Mayo:
“He can play. He knows how to impact a game. We were looking at players and one of the things Michael Finley, who’s now kind of an assistant assistant general manager, said, you want to get somebody that the other team has got to game plan for, that the other team is afraid of at the end of the game, that they can make something happen. We didn’t really have someone who could really just create off the dribble, who we could just give the ball. Jet was a great shooter, Jet did a lot of amazing things, but we needed somebody who could get a lot younger and do a lot of the same things and then some.”
The off-season, which began with the Mavericks falling short in their effort to sign free-agent Deron Williams:
“We knew with the CBA (Collective Bargaining Agreement) that there was going to be a little bit of a rush early on, but then there were going to be a lot of really good players falling through the cracks. When there were, we were ready to pounce. And we think we put together a really nice team.
“We think we’ve positioned ourselves so that we have a young nucleus. We can keep these guys, let them jell and play together, build around Dirk and have room for hopefully someone to come or to trade or whatever happens.”