The NBA Commissioner has spoken about the controversy surrounding the use of the term “owner,” many of the leagues star players have spoken about it as well, but as far as Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban is concerned?
He’s not sweating it.
TMZ caught up with Cuban and asked him several questions pertaining the NBA. However, when the topic of the what terminology should be used to describe the people who own the teams in the league, Cuban says “it’s not that big a deal.”
As Breitbart Sports reported:
‘If you run a company, own a company, start a company … you decide [on what to call yourself],’ Cuban told TMZ.
The issue gained steam after Golden State star forward Draymond Green appeared on LeBron James’
‘You shouldn’t say owner,’ Green said at the time. Green added that owners should be called CEOs or majority shareholder, or some other term because it was insensitive to say a white man owns the labor of black men.
Since then, at least two teams have moved away from ‘owner.’
Steve Ballmer, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, is now called the ‘Chairman’ of the team instead of the owner. And the Philadelphia 76ers now have “managing partners” instead of owners. Co-owners are called ‘limited partners.’
On Monday, TMZ reported that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver comments in which he says the league has already moved away from using the term “owner.”
“I don’t want to overreact to the term because, as I said earlier, people end up twisting themselves into knots avoiding the use of the word owner,” Silver told TMZ. “But we moved away from that term years ago in the league.”
Everyone except Mark Cuban, apparently.
Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter @themightgwinn