Mark Cuban is thinking outside the box: The Mavericks minority owner doesn’t hold back on the NBA’s tanking problem
There has been a lot of discussion about tanking in the NBA lately, but Dallas Mavericks’ partial owner Mark Cuban gave a passionate argument in its favor.
While most NBA owners tread lightly around the league’s most contentious issue, tanking, Mark Cuban, unsurprisingly, did not. In a pair of passionate posts on X this week, the Mavericks minority owner laid out an argument that runs counter to the league’s recent hardline stance: the NBA should embrace tanking rather than punish it.
Mark Cuban: Embrace the tank
The comments come days after Adam Silver publicly declared that tanking, the practice of intentionally losing games to improve draft lottery odds, has reached a level “worse than we’ve seen in recent memory” and hinted that penalties could include loss of draft picks, not just fines.
Rather than side with Silver, Cuban, who retains a minority stake in the franchise he once ran, argued that the whole debate is missing the point. He said the NBA shouldn’t be focused on whether teams lose games; instead, the league should be centered on creating memorable experiences for fans.
“Few can remember the score from the last game they saw,” Cuban wrote, “They can’t remember the dunks or shots. What they remember is who they were with - family, friends, a date.”
He said that narrative of shared experience is what truly matters to fans, not whether a team is intentionally losing games. Cuban went on to defend tanking as a legitimate, and sometimes necessary, strategy for teams looking to rebuild. He pointed to his own history with the Dallas Mavericks, noting that although the franchise didn’t tank “often”, they used strategic losing to improve the roster, most notably to land superstar guard Luka Doncic during the 2018 NBA Draft.
“The one way to get closer to [future success] is via the draft, and trades, and cap room,” Cuban wrote. “You have a better chance of improving via all three when you tank.”
He also criticized the league’s penalties for tanking, saying teams are essentially forced to hide their intentions from fans or risk fines or worse, and that this lack of transparency earns the league distrust.
Cuban didn’t stop at defending tanking. He expanded the conversation to touch on cost and fan accessibility, arguing that high ticket prices and other barriers to entry are bigger problems than intentional losing. “The NBA should worry more about pricing fans out of games than tanking,” he wrote.
His comments also reflect an industry pushback that some fans and insiders have voiced. Many believe the NBA’s current draft lottery system, which is designed to discourage tanking by reducing the odds for the worst teams, hasn’t fully solved the underlying incentive structure that encourages losing.
Cuban’s perspective adds fuel to a debate the league is unlikely to resolve quickly. If nothing else, it reframes the tanking conversation from one about integrity to one about strategy, fan experience, and transparency. Whether the league takes his suggestions seriously remains to be seen, but with a deep playoff field and a stacked draft class, this issue shows no signs of going away any time soon.
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