In times of crisis, we search for answers. Leadership. Someone who’ll tell us all we have to fear is fear itself. A voice of reason amid the chaos.

And that voice this week in the toy department, anyway, was Mark Cuban’s.

Only last month, the Mavs’ owner was up to his usual antics, taking a good talking point about the quality of officiating and ratcheting up the hyperbole until it sounded like your teenager riffing on the state of cafeteria fare.

Statesmanship has never been one of Cuban’s finer qualities. His lack of some is how he once ended up working a Dairy Queen counter.

Yet here he was after Wednesday’s win over the Nuggets — in the wake of news that the NBA had put its season on pause because of the coronavirus — boosting the league office.

“This is not a situation where you fake it ‘til you make it or try to act or sound important,” Cuban told reporters. “The NBA has hired people with expertise in those areas and they are working with people from the government and other people with expertise.

“We have to defer to them and that’s exactly what we’ll do.”

Consider me bamboozled.

Frankly, I would have expected the official response along the lines of his reaction immediately after Scott Tomlin, the Mavs’ communications director, slipped him the news during the game. Cuban’s jaw dropped like a character from a Warner Bros. cartoon. Interviewed courtside, he said his initial reaction to news of the postponement was that it couldn’t be true. “Crazy,” he called it. Like something “out of a movie.”

Mark Cuban is literally all of us right now... pic.twitter.com/3YDacZYmCu — Joey Hayden (@_joeyhayden) March 12, 2020

By the time he’d had a few minutes to gather his thoughts, he could better see the big picture.

This story was bigger than basketball, he said. Bigger than postponed games. Lives are at stake here.

“I’m a lot more worried about my kids and my mom who is 82 years old,” he said, “than when we play in our next game.”

Mark Cuban on the @espn broadcast: “It’s like out of a movie. It’s not even real.” pic.twitter.com/JP6mMbEdMY — Selby Lopez (@LopezSelby31) March 12, 2020

The message implicit in Cuban’s sober response was if even the ultimate hoops junkie gets it, so should all of us. Reminds of the story about Chuck Yeager, the test pilot made famous in Tom Wolfe’s ground-breaking book, The Right Stuff. Yeager’s calm, country patter in the cockpit has been the model for pilots ever since. But when a fellow pilot was losing consciousness during a high-altitude maneuver, it was Yeager’s sudden bark over the radio that saved him. The endangered pilot later claimed he was so shocked to hear Yeager raise his voice, he figured he must have done something awfully wrong.

Cuban’s response since the league’s announcement is Yeager-like, only in reverse. The NBA took the lead in deciding the appropriate course of action, and Cuban became the face of that decision. His comments blanketed the web and TV afterward. The owner famous for setting the league on fire sold Adam Silver’s actions with his reasoned response. Probably not a coincidence that other pro leagues shortly followed suit.

Cuban didn’t just smooth over the reaction to a stoppage. He showed compassion for minimum wage workers at American Airlines Center. Promised to come up with a plan to replace their lost wages.

And within 48 hours, Cuban delivered. The Mavs released a statement Friday afternoon indicating the organization and American Airlines Center officials arranged to pay event staff for the six home games scrubbed for the duration of the league’s 30-day hiatus.

For an idea of some of the people covered: security, police, parking attendants, housekeeping, in-arena entertainers and guest services staff.

A half-dozen other owners have followed Cuban’s lead and talked about helping out hourly employees, who reportedly number anywhere from a thousand to 2,000 per franchise. Players have ponied up, too. Giannis Antetokounmpo, Blake Griffin and Kevin Love have reportedly pledged $100,000 each.

One thing to say you’re sorry for the plight of workers; quite another to get your wallet out.

Of course, you could argue that it’s the least Cuban could do. Under terms of the last collective bargaining agreement, owners aren’t required to pay players for canceled games. Good chance they have insurance. Ric Bucher of Bleacher Report writes they might even have a slush fund for just such occasions.

No matter what happens, it’s fair to say Cuban isn’t going broke. You could also argue he’s always been generous with good causes.

Until last week, he’d simply never been one to keep his head when it came to the general welfare of his beloved Mavs. To be fair, he’d never faced a situation so unprecedented, either. When the time came, he rose to the occasion. This guy, I could get used to.

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