04/26/24
July 12, 2010
Cuban Suggests Player Tampering in Heat Deals: Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban will ask the league's Board of Governors to investigate whether player tampering took place in the Miami Heat's signing of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, who some suggest orchestrated their joint move for up to four years. "[T]here has to be a way to keep these guys away from each other for the last week anyway," he said.
posted by rcade to basketball at 01:49 PM - 7 comments
Looks, tastes, and smells like collusion to me. It also appears that these players not only colluded but were not negotiating in good faith as they seems to have already made a deal amongst themselves. The league will take a hard look at this as it could jeopardize the concept of free agency.
posted by Atheist at 01:54 PM on July 12, 2010
This morning on TV the conversation was about how basketball continues to want to bring these players together, be it for the Olympics or whatever, have them bond, get to know each other, become a winning team, then, apparently, forget they ever met each other and never speak again. Not gonna work that way. The system is created for this type of thing to happen, and I'm surprised that if these rocket scientists (James; Wade; Bosh) could make it happen that the league couldn't see it coming. The NBA must have subscribed to the old notion that three stars of this stature needed their own team and their egos couldn't mesh on one roster. Cuban is just mad he couldn't pull something like this together. Not that it matters. His team will continue to exit round 1 of the playoffs like clockwork.
posted by dyams at 02:23 PM on July 12, 2010
Sort of a silly idea. The rule would be something like players can't talk about anything related to where they might want to play or playing together if they are ever under contract. A big rule for what I suspect will be a rare occurrence. Maybe the NBA should rethink their salary cap instead.
posted by bperk at 03:01 PM on July 12, 2010
There is no free agency if collusion is tolerated on either side. Players and owners should be bound by reasonable rules of ethical free enterprise and a fair and unbiased bidding process. The owners will never stand for collusion to shape teams, boycott certain organizations, or influence salaries. If that were to happen watch how fast the owners get together break the CBA and do away with free agency or severely restrict it.
What it looks like these three guys did will backfire and hurt other players and the NBA down the road. Not only will the fans hate them but so will the other players when new rules are instituted to deal with this kind of back door bargaining.
The NBA takes another hit to their integrity with this latest fiasco.
posted by Atheist at 06:02 PM on July 12, 2010
Waiting for a players association in football, basketball, or baseball to come out with a policy that its members should refrain from signing with one of the Arizona teams because of Arizona's immigration policy. Of course, because it is a union, that will not be considered collusion.
posted by graymatters at 06:59 PM on July 12, 2010
Good luck Mark. Try to enforce free agents from not talking to one another.
Look, we're used to the shoe being on the other foot - Teams having more power than players. Well, the NBA landscape is a bit different. They players have a lot of clout and now they, like the owners learned long, long ago, are using it.
Strangely, THIS is far more slave-owner mentality than anything Glibert said.
posted by WeedyMcSmokey at 11:14 PM on July 12, 2010
I have been waiting for something like this to come up since the SpoFi post a few days ago linking to the article on Bosh, James, and Wade's supposed master career planning.
No doubt there are investigative hound dogs are on the trail of this, Mark Cuban or no Mark Cuban. Tampering and collusion issues are hard to avoid wondering about.
According to the article, they all agreed to demand shorter re-signing deals in 2007 so they could orchestrate this teaming up in 2010. Where there's that, there may be more.
If this whole glam slam 3 amigos thing unravels and goes to hell, I will not be sad.