Although more states are enacting recreational cannabis laws, Texas is not one of them, and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is not with the smoke. With more NBA players being honest about their usage of the plant, Cuban is not a fan of use while an active player, and there have been consequences when he finds out, namely the loss of a job on his team.
“I’ve traded guys because they smoke too much,” Cuban said on the Pat Bev podcast. “Teams have their own culture, right? If you get some young dudes on there who are just figuring out what the team or NBA culture is, and you’ve got one dude that you walk down the hall in the hotel and you know he’s on that floor and there’s no doubt about it, and then all of a sudden these other kids start picking up on it.”
The Mark Cuban Perspective
Cuban believes that peer pressure is alive and well and when it comes to cannabis, he thinks that if one gets away with it, then the rest will follow.
“You see them coming out of their room. You see them a little bit red-eyed coming to practice all of a sudden,” Cuban continued. “You don’t want them going down that road.”
Recently, Kevin Durant was caught trying to be low-key smoking weed at a Drake concert, which is hard to do if you’re a 6-foot-10 superstar. On an episode of “Next Guest Needs No Introduction,” Durant told David Letterman, “it clears the distractions out of your brain a little bit.”
Before the 2020 NBA bubble season, the league announced that there would be no recreational drug testing. When that extended to the bubble, players indulged in cannabis. The assumption is that they are not playing under the influence. However, former Cleveland Cavaliers player JR Smith shed light on the player perspective.
Breaking The Weed Barrier
“We was blowing it down in there,” Smith said on the “All the Smoke” podcast. “I’m glad it happened because it finally broke that barrier and that stigma that you couldn’t play and all of this, it was a drug, it was this and that.
“When you go to the bubble basketball, some of the dudes was playing, it was like practice games, kind of situations, so some of them really can’t play that well in front of 30,000,” Smith continued. “But at this same time, you see some of the best levels of basketball, you seen these dudes still doing what they was doing, kicking, killing.”
Cuban knows that players smoke. He doesn’t want it excessively on his team. His perspective treats it like an infection that will make the whole team sick.
“Everybody smokes, right?” Cuban continued on the “Pat Bev Podcast.” “It’s not about that, but there’s smoking, there’s how powerful the s*** you’re doing is, and then there’s how much you do. If you get past that level and there’s a chance you might drag somebody with you, you got to look at the bigger picture.”
In the bigger picture, cannabis does not make sense for the Dallas Mavericks to Mark Cuban.
