Coaching change brings Cuban back into Mavs’ picture

Now that Josh Howard has apologized, we can all get back to pressing Maverick matters, which is fretting about how Mark Cuban is ruining the team with his interest, involvement and money.

Who does he think he is? The owner?

He really stepped into a mess at media day Monday, noting almost half of Dallas’ players so despised former coach Avery Johnson that trades were demanded. Wait, half of this team had not turned on Avery? I thought that is why he was fired, because everybody hated everybody in Mavsland.

Players had tired of him. Avery had tired of them. Word was he had started counting down minutes and seconds until he’d be able to get away from J-Kidd.

And he loathed Cuban, with Cuban souring on him.

You know, your basic problems that lead to coaches being former coaches, especially when linked with two years of first-round playoff failure.

"It was not pretty last year," Cuban said. "It was just very, very difficult. I will tell you this: Probably half the team at one point or the other said they wanted to be traded. Or they wouldn’t come back if there wasn’t a change made."

And it was here that Cuban really angered his critics. He blamed himself, at least partially, for the free fall from NBA Finals to coach fired. He said he was not involved enough.

"It was my choice, at the beginning of the year, to say, 'OK, Avery, you went to the Finals, you won 67 games. Rather than be involved on a continuous basis and make management-style decisions, you do what you want to do, and I’ll back off,’ " Cuban said. "It was still relatively new to Avery, and I should have stayed more involved."

This hardly seemed like a huge deal, at least to me, when he said this at media day, mostly because he almost immediately defined involved as not Xs and Os, not game planning and not really anything to do with basketball. He is in charge of problems, which not surprisingly has become Avery, Avery, Avery.

He is why Josh struggled and they lost to New Orleans and Jason Terry disappeared and why the J-Kidd move did not work. Or so we are led to believe.

This is usually how it goes, just ask Bill Parcells and Buck Showalter. The coach or manager on the way out is always to blame for failing to win a playoff game or just failure in general. Whether this actually has merit is usually determined by what happens after he is gone.

Big Bill and Buck may already have had a couple of laughs. And Avery might, too. Or he might not if this version of the Mavs actually advances. He certainly was a problem, but was he the problem? And is it too simplistic to say firing him fixes everything?

"It’s not too simplistic at all. That’s why we made the change," Cuban said. "It’s like when Nellie quit on us. I didn’t want to make a change. I just didn’t have a choice. I’m a big believer in the devil you know is a lot better than the devil you don’t know ... but we just needed to change. It was just not going to work. I knew it was not going to work. Avery knew it was not going to work ... "

So did the "more than five, less than seven" players who asked to be traded a year ago. So Avery’s gone. The players are on the clock. Josh has apologized. And we can all get back to fretting about if Cuban is ruining the Mavs.