Mark Cuban Explains It All

Why can't the U.S. basketball team seem to win in international competition anymore? Leave it to Mark Cuban to unravel this mystery. It may shock you to learn that Cuban lays the blame directly on those damn pyramid-shaped lanes. Oh, and the international ball. And the way the referees are dressed. Here he is in Blog Maverick, a post which he repeated from an interview a day earlier with CBS Sportsline's Mike Freeman.

I would be willing to bet that if you brought back all the same teams in the final eight and played under NBA rules, with an NBA ball on an NBA-sized court, we would torch them. The different rules require different skill sets. It's that simple. If one set of rules isn't natural to you, you will struggle to adapt.

Cuban's arguable frustration about the rules aside, the real fun here is reading the preamble by Freeman, who wrote of Cuban:

You are about to read some of the smartest analysis from any NBA player, coach or official about why it seems the Americans, when it comes to international basketball play, couldn't beat a foreign team composed of three French Poodles and two third-graders if their lives depended on it.

And:

That makes so much sense my head hurts. ... As usual, Cuban makes too much sense.

It's all topped off by a commenter on Cuban's own blog, who sums it up nicely:

This journalist is brown-nosing Cuban so hard, he'll have to have his nostrils surgically separated from Mark's posterior.

More On USA Basketball [Blog Maverick] A New Game Plan For Team USA [ESPN]