Dallas Basketball

NBA Fines Mavs $750K; Mark Cuban to Match with Charity Donation

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is having to pay a hefty fine for the way his team handled the final two games of the regular season. Was it a fair number, though?

Dalton Trigg

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The NBA announced on Friday that the Dallas Mavericks have been fined $750,000 for “conduct detrimental to the league” following last weekend’s transparent tanking of the final two games of the regular season.

"The Dallas Mavericks' decision to restrict key players from fully participating in an elimination game last Friday against Chicago undermined the integrity of our sport," NBA Executive Vice President and Head of Basketball Operations Joe Dumars said in an official statement. 

"The Mavericks' actions failed our fans and our league."

Before last Friday’s game against the Chicago Bulls, the Mavs still had a mathematical chance of making the NBA’s play-in tournament. Instead of pushing for the No. 10 seed, though, Dallas opted to rest Luka Doncic, Kyrie Irving and several other key players in order to enhance their chances of retaining a top-10 pick in this year’s draft.

The obvious last-second tank job by the Mavs drew the ire of many around the league, although many other teams had arguably been doing more egregious tanking over the final two months of the season without any public outrage to show for it.

The $750,000 is a hefty fine, but it’s also a drop in the bucket for Mavs owner Mark Cuban, who confirmed to DallasBasketball.com on Friday evening that he is planning match the fine with a charity donation.

In 2018, the Mavs were fined $600,000 for essentially the same thing, so maybe they’re chalking up the extra $150,000 to inflation.

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Dalton Trigg
DALTON TRIGG

Dalton Trigg is the Editor-In-Chief for Dallas Basketball, as well as the Executive Editor overseeing Inside The Rockets, Inside The Spurs, All Knicks, and The Magic Insider. He is the founder and host for the Mavs Step Back Podcast, which is a proud part of the Blue Wire podcast network. Trigg graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi’s College of Business and Economic Development with a bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship in 2016. After spending a few years with multiple Dallas Mavericks-related blogs, including SB Nation’s Mavs Moneyball, Trigg joined DallasBasketball.com as a staff writer in 2018 and never looked back. At the start of 2022, he was promoted to the EIC title he holds now. Through the years, Trigg has conducted a handful of high-profile one-on-one interviews to add to his resume — in both writing and podcasting. Some of his biggest interviews have been with Mavs owner Mark Cuban, Mavs GM Nico Harrison, now-retired legend Dirk Nowitzki and many other current/former players and team staffers. Many of those interviews and other articles by Trigg have been aggregated by other well-known sports media websites, such as Yahoo Sports, CBS Sports, Bleacher Report and others. You can find Trigg on all major social media channels, but his most prevalent platform is on Twitter. Whether it’s posting links to his DBcom work, live-tweeting Mavs games or merely giving his opinions on things going on with Dallas and the rest of the NBA, the daily content never stops rolling. For any inquiries, please email Dalton@MavsStepBack.com.

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