Mark Cuban Explains Why He Banned 2 ESPN Reporters From Covering Mavericks Games

Mark Cuban reveals why he decided to pull the media credentials of two ESPN reporters who cover the Mavericks regularly.

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Complex Original

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On Monday, we learned that Mavericks owner Mark Cuban had revoked the media credentials for a pair of veteran ESPN writers, Tim MacMahon and Marc Stein, despite the fact that they were originally granted press credentials for the entire 2016-17 season:

The Mavs owner's move was widely panned by many media members and the Professional Basketball Writers Association:

Cuban didn't immediately offer up an explanation for why he revoked the ESPN reporters' credentials, but there was speculation that he did so because he was mad that ESPN yanked their full-time reporters off of the Mavs' beat this season. Cuban initially told Sports Illustrated's Richard Deitsch that he wouldn't comment on the situation:

But late Monday night, Cuban reconsidered and decided that he would speak out about why he banned the ESPN reporters from covering games. And as it turns out, it doesn't actually have anything to do with the network's coverage of the Mavericks this season. In an email sent to SB Nation, Cuban explained that his decision "wasn't about editorial." He added that it also "wasn't about a reduction in number of games [covered] this year." Instead, he said that he's concerned that wire services and publications are going to start relying more and more on services that provide automated stories on sporting events. The Associated Press works with a company called Automated Insights that helps them generate stories on minor-league baseball games, and Cuban is worried the AP and other wire services could start doing the same thing with professional sports soon.

"Maybe I will be wrong but I see a direct path from the trends in coverage of games we are seeing over the last couple years to the automation of reporting on games and the curation of related content," Cuban wrote in a separate email to the AP. "This isn't a knock on wire services or their reporters. They are valued and valuable in sports coverage."

Cuban also alluded to this line of reasoning in his email to SB Nation. "If I did nothing and the trend towards more and more games being covered by wire reporters continues, then it could get to the point where it was too late," he said. "I felt like if I didn't do it now, I wouldn't have a chance to stop or slow what I felt was a negative trend for the Mavs and NBA."

Cuban did point out that he realizes it seems "counterintuitive" to call for more human coverage of games by banning reporters, but he said that he felt it was the only way to get people to pay attention to what he perceives to be a problem.

In his email to SB Nation, Cuban concluded by saying that his biggest fear is that sports will be covered by "robots" instead of reporters in the future. He said that he's brought this up with some of the publications that cover the Mavericks and that ESPN was not receptive to his concerns, which forced him to ban their reporters. "Instead of a wire reporter, we will see data fed into algorithms and game summaries spit out," he said. "I reached out not just to ESPN, but to all our beat writer publishers and asked what I could do to make sure that we got coverage of all of our games. The only publisher that resisted was ESPN."

It's unclear how long Cuban is going to ban MacMahon and Stein, but this is a story that's not going to go away, even though the Mavericks owner has responded to it. Stay tuned to see how Cuban decides to handle the situation moving forward.

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