NBA Q&A: Mark Cuban

Courtesy of KESN-FM

On how upset Dirk Nowitzki was when the Mavs missed out on Dwight Howard:

“Dirk is fired up. Yeah, he would have liked to have gotten Dwight. But we sat down and we told him, here’s is Plan B. Here are the guys we’re going after. When we got Monta (Ellis). If you ask him about him, it was like can we get him, can we get him, can we get him so again, everybody dismisses Monta Ellis. Oh, he can’t do this. He can’t do that. You’ve got to look at our history of integrating scorers like that. When we took Jet (Jason Terry) for Antoine Walker, everybody was so down on Jet. I hate to say this about Antoine because I like the guy personally, but to show you what the hawks thought about Jet, they took Antoine Walker and then, we had Stack (Jerry Stackhouse) and in order to get us to take Stack, they had to give us the No. 5 pick, which turned into Devin Harris. We gave up Antawn Jamison, who turned into an All-Star for them. We feel like when you put a guy like Monta into our system with a player like Dirk into our culture where we do a good job of integrating players, we think Monta can make the same advances and have the same improvements to his game.”

On saying the Mavericks are better off without Dwight Howard:

“I’ve said it over and over again. When you sign one free agent, you’re not going to fill all your holes. It’s typically a two-year plan to not only have that superstar but also to fill the positions around that person. It still takes a team to win. You have to fill in the spots. We’ve had Dirk (Nowitzki) for all these years, and we’ve continued to make trades to fill spots around him. We started a season with Dwight Gooden as our starting center and Tim Thomas as his backup, but we evolved from that to get Brendan Haywood and Caron Butler and DeShawn Stevenson and grow that into a championship team. My point was we obviously went after Dwight. We were disappointed. That was our primary goal. We failed. That was unfortunate. But that’s the way it turned. We had a Plan B, and the Plan B was put together the best possible team that not only gives us a chance to compete this season but creates a foundation for future seasons knowing that we still have max cap room and flexibility to improve our team. We’re in an industry that loves headline porn, and the headline was Cuban says we’re better off with Dwight Howard. We wouldn’t have gone after Dwight Howard if we didn’t think that was the best approach for us. Once we didn’t get him, we knew we could get more roster spots. I think we did a great job of it.”