Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says that the “horrible” state of college basketball hurts the NBA by hampering the growth of college players and making them unprepared for the pros.
In the interview, Cuban insisted that the current, slower rate of play now popular in college hoops turns out players not ready for the boards-pounding style in the professional ranks.
The always outspoken owner said that if the NCAA wanted to stunt a player’s growth and keep him from being able to go pro, they couldn’t do any better than “having the 35-second shot clock and having the game look and officiated the way it is.”
Cuban continued, “You’ve got three kids passing on the perimeter. With 10 seconds on the shot clock, they try to make something happen and two other kids stand around. They don’t look for anything and then run back on defense, so there’s no transition game because two out of five or three out of five or in some cases four out of five kids aren’t involved in the play.”
“It’s uglier than ugly,” Cuban added, “and it’s evidenced by the scoring going down. When the NBA went through that, we changed things.”
The Mavericks owner called the situation in college basketball “horrible” and “ridiculous” then said it’s “worse than high school” with how slow play has become.
The referees couldn’t manage a White Castle. Seriously, the college game is more physical than the NBA game, and the variation in how it’s called from game to game [is a problem]. Hell, they don’t even have standards on balls. They use different balls. One team’s got one ball, the other team’s got another ball. There are so many things that are ridiculous.
Cuban hopes that the NCAA will change its system to help support the pros.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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