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Dallas mavericks roster for tonight9/27/2023 Guys like Redick were effective in their heyday but way past their prime by the time they headed to Texas. Doncic is brilliant but was acquired in the draft rather than a trade, while his current teammate, Kristaps Porzingis, is a solid NBA player but probably not worth the two first-round picks the Mavs gave up to acquire him from the Knicks. It’s almost like they believed they just needed to get as many white guys in as they could in the hope that one of them would be as sublimely excellent as Nowitzki. It feels like Cuban, and more specifically Nelson, tried in vain to repeat the magic of Nowitzki. The list is long and dreadful: Keith Van Horn, Austin Croshere, Matt Carroll, Rudy Fernandez, Shawn Bradley, Zaza Pachulia, Doug McDermott and JJ Redick. Indeed, the Mavs have traded for more white guys as centerpieces of a deal than any other team. So the excessive signings of terrible white players under his ownership had to be, at least partially, a Cuban call. And since buying the team, Cuban has always blurred the line between superfan and shadow GM. Much of the blame can be laid at the door of Donnie Nelson, who was the team’s general manager from 2005 until he left the team in June last year. No, it’s their seemingly unquenchable thirst for terrible white players that sinks them. While there are valid reasons to push back against that philosophy – after all, the US have won seven of the last eight men’s Olympic tournaments and the other winner was Argentina – it does have coherence, even if it’s wrong.īut the problem with Cuban’s Mavericks isn’t their penchant for white superstars – if every white guy they acquired was as good as Nash, Nowitzki and Doncic they’d be perennial champions. If you look at the basketball education of kids starting at 11 years old in Europe and particularly Slovenia which is basketball oriented,” said Cuban in 2019. European players “actually learn to play the game. They also have one black European player, Frank Ntilikina (France). And all four of the white players on the Dallas’s active roster this season are European: Doncic (Slovenia), Kristaps Porzingis (Latvia), Maxi Kleber (Germany) and Boban Marjanovic (Serbia). This explains some of the racial balance of the current team: European players are usually white and American players are usually black. He believes European players, who usually enter the professional ranks at an earlier age, have a better basketball education than American players. Some argued that the Mavericks should have picked a black superstar, Trae Young, over Doncic in the 2018 draft but Cuban’s preference for European players has a certain logic. Although the Mavericks have a dubious history of toxic workplace culture when it comes to female employees, Cuban has thrown his support behind Black Lives Matter and has appointed a black CEO (Cynthia Marshall), president (Terdema Ussery), head coaches (Jason Kidd and Avery Johnson) and general manager (Nico Harrison) during his time in Dallas. It’s tempting to put this down to racism or at least unconscious bias on the part of the Mavericks and their owner, Mark Cuban. The Mavericks, in the literal sense, do not look like the rest of the league. In more than half of those 15 seasons there were at least four white players, not to mention at least two starting white players. In 15 of the last 21 Mavs seasons, there were three or more white players on the 12-man active roster. Yet one franchise has often kept the dream of mediocre white guys alive: the Dallas Mavericks. It seems every decade, the white NBA player becomes less relevant.
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