He’s piling on, but he’s got a right to, as most billionaires usually feel they do.

He’s a billionaire who is letting other billionaires make their billions on the back of free labor from teenagers, and he doesn’t like the way those billionaires are training his future employees. Training that this particular billionaire, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, doesn’t have to pay a penny for. Mark Cuban thinks the NCAA is hurting the NBA with its anachronistic play-calling, poor refereeing, and outdated shot clock length, and he’s not wrong:

"It's horrible. It's ridiculous," Cuban said. "It's worse than high school. You've got 20 to 25 seconds of passing on the perimeter and then somebody goes and tries to make a play and do something stupid, and scoring's gone down.

"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."

[…]

"If they want to keep kids in school and keep them from being pro players, they're doing it the exact right way by having the 35-second shot clock and having the game look and officiated the way it is," Cuban said Wednesday night. "Just because kids don't know how to play a full game of basketball.

"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.”

Cuban went on to call NCAA ball “uglier than ugly” in his comments prior to Dallas’ rather aesthetically-pleasing 107-104 win over the Phoenix Suns on Wednesday (so aesthetically pleasing that Jeff Van Gundy decided to ignore the game for five whole minutes to rehash 197 blog posts from last December about playoff seeding). Again, he’s not wrong.

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This isn’t an NBA vs. NCAA argument. Preferences are preferences, and it’s just fine to enjoy NCAA ball even if others deem that it isn’t the “better” game. We’re obviously in the pro camp, but “better” will always be in the eye of the beholder. I, for one, will always prefer the Minutemen to Mozart.

Cuban’s preferences are at the core of this, obviously, but his point about the NCAA failing to prepare potential pros for action warrants investigation.

Andrew Wiggins will be the NBA’s next great star, he should be the 2014-15 NBA Rookie of the Year, and he went to a top-flight program in Kansas for one year of seasoning before heading off to the pros.

He also would have been far better served being selected top overall straight out of high school by the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2013 NBA draft – even if the Cavs were working with a front office and coaching staff at the time that the team (rightfully, and far later than they should have) decided to fire towards the end of what would have been Wiggins’ rookie season. Those 35 games at Kansas, playing big minutes as a freshman, helped gear Wiggins for his professional career; but that season wouldn’t have been nearly as helpful as a season spent playing 80-odd games with a pro team – even if it was the pro team that biffed on structuring Anthony Bennett’s career.

The NBA in the fin de siècle and even after Cuban bought his Mavericks in the first month of 2000 was a terrible watch. Coaches dominated play-calling, hand-checking was considered illegal but rarely called, and every millisecond of the 24-second shot clock was wrung out. Teams sent two players to one side of the court and asked the other three to loiter on the weak side. Allowing for improvisation and, shock horror, three-pointers were considered a sign of weakness by insecure coaches like Larry Brown.

The league responded by cracking down on hand-checking and tightening the backcourt rules violation length. It also legalized a minor version of a strong-side zone in 1999 and abolished illegal defense in 2001. “We changed things,” Cuban reminded on Wednesday.

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