Commissioner addresses timeouts, Cuban and more

	NBA commissioner David Stern says he'd be more than happy to hand Mark Cuban the championship trophy. Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE/Getty Images

SI senior writer Phil Taylor spoke with NBA commissioner David Stern for a Q&A published in this week's magazine. Here are additional excerpts from their conversation.

SI: Is it true that you're not happy with the way the end of games sometimes drag out?

Stern: Timeouts are like precious gems guarded by coaches for important times, and I accept that. But we're thinking about the possibility that we don't need quite so many of them, at least in overtimes. Three [full timeouts] and a 20 in overtime? We need to look at what changes we can make in that area. It's all part of the effort to keep improving ourselves. Not just putting in new things but going back and looking at old things. There's nothing that's out-of-bounds in terms of reexamining.

SI: Any thought of using instant replay to a greater extent than it is now, which is mainly to determine whether shots have beaten the buzzer?

Stern: It's a subject that is always up for discussion. It's a tough one because you hate to have a game end on a play that everyone realizes is wrong. But on the other hand, then you're going to have to stop the game [to check replays] all the time if you're going to stop it at all. Why is two points in the last period different than two points in the first period? It's a tough one. But our emphasis has been to use all of the resources we have to help our referees develop, because they're intensely interested in being perfect and actually are much more frustrated than we are when they don't get it perfect. There's nothing harsher than the self-critique that comes out of a game where a referee realizes there was a shuffle or an elbow that wasn't picked up.

SI: You've fined Mavericks' owner Mark Cuban more than any other owner in recent years. How would you characterize your relationship with him?

Stern: I would say we have good relationship. We can talk about any subject and we do. Actually we e-mail more than we talk. He probably uses e-mail more than any other owner. The best thing about Mark is that the fans in Dallas know that there's somebody who's living and breathing the quality of the team on the court and the quality of the entertainment experience.

SI: Given your disagreements with Cuban over the years, will you find it awkward at all if you find yourself handing him the championship trophy sometime soon?

Stern: Absolutely not. It would be no different than any other owner. If his team wins the championship, then they will deserve the championship trophy and I'll be happy to hand it to them.

SI: One of the negative perceptions that remains about the NBA is that huge guaranteed contracts are a problem, that many players don't play as hard once they get guaranteed money.

Stern: I have too much respect for our players and their passion for the game to go there. I view it more in economic terms, that when players are so valuable within the confines of our system, they receive long-term contracts. In the later years of those contracts perhaps they are playing below the value of the contract. So you wind up with players who shall remain nameless making double-digit millions because they just hit it right. OK, it happens. The way we address that is through a cap, through a limitation on the size of individual player contracts and, in the last deal, by shortening the [maximum] length of the contracts by a year. So it's an incrementalist approach, and that's sort of not totally unreflective of the way we do business.

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