Mark Cuban thinks we all need to chill on anointing Lakers

Mark Cuban is very, very good at promoting Mark Cuban and with that the Dallas Mavericks. In a marketing world where you increasingly need to be your own brand Cuban is way ahead of the curve.

And if there are rival brands to your Mavericks brand — say, the Los Angeles Lakers and their new additions of Steve Nash and Dwight Howard — then you downplay that brand and pump up yours.

With that background, we bring you Cuban’s comments about the Lakers and his own Mavericks during an amusing if not terribly informative “season ticket holders press conference” with the words transcribed by Sean Deveney of the Sporting News.

“The Lakers have done this before,” Cuban said. “Remember Gary Payton, Karl Malone and Kobe and Shaq were all together, and it didn’t work.

“It takes great chemistry, like coach (Rick Carlisle) alluded to, it takes guys wanting to be there — I don’t know if all their guys want to be there — it’s going to be interesting…

“Look, (the Lakers are) going to be a great team, but I remember when we made our run,” Cuban said. “We weren’t supposed to win any series. The Lakers were defending champs when we swept them, and they had everybody back. A lot of teams do a great job winning the summer, but I never get so antsy about what happens over the summer.”

It’s the “they are great on paper but…” argument everybody makes right now. Because, it’s really the only thing you can say about the Lakers until they do take the court. And he is right about the Mavericks run and things needing to come together. We just can’t say yet if the Lakers will or won’t (but with those veterans I think will is far more likely).

Then Cuban went on to praise the chemistry of the Mavericks, which have eight new players this season. That Dallas team has more talent than some seem to give it credit for — Darren Collison is a good point guard, O.J. Mayo can fill it up, Chris Kaman is solid and they still have that Dirk Nowitzki guy. He’s pretty good. Dallas is a playoff team and will push for another 50-win season, something they have done every year since Steve Nash frosted his hair and played in Big D.

But the Lakers are going to be better.

One other note to Mavs fans after having watched the stream of that press conference: You guys get the coverage you deserve. There was a whole lot of “the media hates us/we don’t get any respect,” which frankly 29 other fan bases complain about, too. Heat fans complain about it. But here’s the truth — today’s media is a democracy where you vote with your eyeballs and clicks. If enough people were clicking on Mavs stories there would be more of them on this blog and others (and we still do a lot), but the fact is you all have voted with those clicks and you like Heat/Lakers/Knicks/Celtics stories a lot more. This is not the 1960s where Walter Cronkite could claim objectivity because the news division was expected to lose money. Today the media is part of the capitalist culture created by people like Cuban (he gets it, watch what he puts on HDNet). It’s about profit. I like to think we can do that with some even handedness (even though plenty of you don’t see it that way with me) and smart commentary on all the teams, but the bottom line doesn’t change. This blog is a business, too. Which is to say, if you want more Mavericks stories, then click on and read more Mavericks stories.