Mark Cuban Plans to Sign Players to Longer Deals Next Season

To no one’s great surprise, the one-year contract experiment on aging players failed miserably in Dallas this season. Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says he’s learned his lesson, and promises that longer deals will be signed in 2013-’14. Per the Dallas Morning News: “Following Wednesday’s season-ending victory over New Orleans, guard Darren Collison talked about the difficulty of trying to maintain the Mavericks’ franchise’s high standards with a team full of nine players who in the final year of their contracts, or entering option years. ‘We judge ourselves on making the playoffs and winning the championship, that’s just how this organization measures itself,’ he said. ‘Definitely we didn’t do as expected, but to play with guys that’s on the last year of their deals, to be able to withstand everything that came at us this year, I thought we did a good job. It’s not easy playing on the last year of your contract, playing together as a team.’ Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said before the game that he doesn’t believe the roster full of potential short-timers had an impact. He pointed out that Utah had a similar makeup this season, and that Dallas’ 2011 championship squad had several players who were at the end of their contracts. ‘It wasn’t the contracts. Guys played hard. We just didn’t play well together. Like I said before, our basketball I.Q. wasn’t where it needed to be. It wasn’t about contracts.’ Cuban did, however, all but promise that next season’s Mavericks will not have nearly as many players on one-year or expiring deals. ‘We’re going to be opportunistic and try to improve the team,’ he said. ‘I don’t see us just signing just one-year deals anymore. I think we want to grab onto some people to be part of a longer-term solution and see what happens. We’re not going to make a financial commitment just to say we made a financial commitment and say that we did. If there’s nobody there to sign that helps us, we won’t sign anybody and we’ll tell everybody exactly why we did what we did and deal with the consequences. But we think there will at least be some guys that we think can help us. We’ll see who they are and we’ll see what we can do.'”