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Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban admitted that his team is tanking and he told his players it would be better if they kept losing games the rest of the season.

In a podcast released on Monday, Cuban said he recently told Mavs players that “losing is our best option.”

“I’m probably not supposed to say this, but, like, I just had dinner with a bunch of our guys the other night and here we are, you know, we weren’t competing for the playoffs I was like, ‘Look, losing is our best option,’” Cuban said on “House Call with Dr. J,” a podcast hosted by NBA legend Julius Irving.

“Adam [Silver] would hate hearing that, but I at least sat down and I explained it to them. And I explained what our plans were going to be this summer, that we’re not going to tank again, this was, like, a year-and-a-half tanking and that was too brutal for me. But being transparent, I think that’s the key to being kind of a player’s owner and having stability."

The Mavericks are currently 18-40, the third-worst record in the NBA.

The team with the league’s worst record has a 25 percent chance of landing the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft. Second-worst has a 19.9 chance and third-worst has a 15.6 percent chance of getting the top pick.