I must applaud Dallas Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban for his recent comments about fully integrating a sport psychologist within his team. In fact, I just wrote a blog last week about the dire need in professional sports to bring on these services in light of today’s athletes and their growing list of off-field problems. Cuban gets it as a sport leader — he obviously sees that his players are his number one asset, and helping today’s young athletes on and off the field makes a lot of sense when you think of the tens of millions of dollars invested in them. Unfortunately, pro sports do not have enough Mark Cuban type forward-thinking owners — owners not afraid to break the “old school” sports mentality that coaches can handle and fix players problems – or that teams can quickly address problems reactively after they occur!Admittedly, Mark Cuban is a polarizing figure in sports — he can be vocal and often displays a lot of emotion from the stands (and if you are not a Mavs fan I could see how this can be annoying to you). Still, when I read his comments about integrating Dr. Kalkstein with the team, I felt like he took the words right out of my mouth (actually, he may have, check my blog article from last week and you will see how similar we think on this issue).Below is an excerpt of Cuban’s comments — see for yourself how brilliant his views are on comprehensive care and coverage for his players – its mighty impressive:…To balance as well as deepen the layers of advice he receives, Cuban has rehired sports psychologist Don Kalkstein to work full time with the Mavs. Cuban said he dismissed Kalkstein in 2007 at the request of Johnson before rehiring the psychologist last season.“Avery didn’t like him around,” Cuban said. “Avery wanted it to be his team. It was my decision to think, Well, Avery took us to the [2007 NBA] Finals and won 67 games, he’s earned that right. It turned out if we would have kept him, [Johnson] might still be here.”Why is a psychologist so important to the team?”When you have 20-something-year-old kids, they’re going to have fun, right?” Cuban said. “I don’t have any problem with that as long as it doesn’t bother your job. And so the minute it impacts your ability to do your job, I have a problem with that.”Cuban counts on Kalkstein to provide information on team chemistry — but to do so without betraying confidences.”He won’t give me the particulars on individuals, but he gives me the sense of the team,” Cuban said. “He won’t violate privacy, but I’ll ask how one guy fits in the team situation vs. another guy, how one guy can communicate with the coaches vs. another guy, will this guy be able to evolve and communicate with the coaches? We’ve got to be able to put everybody in a position to succeed, and the only way to do that is to be able to communicate with him or find somebody who will.”Chemistry is critical. Sometimes there are little nuances of things that negatively impact the chemistry that over the course of the long season you’ve got to be able to nip in the bud. And if you don’t — you see it with teams all the time, and most teams just hope they work themselves through and put it on the coach or the GM [to fix the issues]. But just because you coach basketball or you evaluate basketball talent, that doesn’t mean you’re great at sports psychology or understanding the chemistry of a team. And just because it worked in the ’80s doesn’t mean it’s going to work in the ’90s or the 2000s or the 2010s.”You’ve got to be able to cut bait and know when you’ve got problems and know when you can solve those problems internally and when you can’t, and know what you’re going to do about them. There are guys we traded just because of addition through subtraction.”So Kalkstein helps? “He always does, yes,” Cuban said. “And you put that together with your own personal experiences and what you see. He travels with us, he’s out there with the guys shagging balls, and he’s behind the bench with the coaches.”It’s not like the players have formal sessions with Kalkstein. “No, he just talks to them — let’s go out and shoot, and he’ll shag balls for them and just talk to them. And again, I won’t ask him what he tells them or what he asks them, because I want them to know that it’s private and that he doesn’t share that with me at all. But he helps to qualify our roster — here are the guys who are going to be able to communicate, and here’s where the communication problems are going to come. … You’ve got to know everything.”He’s the reason why we drafted Devin Harris [with the No. 5 pick in 2004], because when he interviewed Devin over some of the other players he said, ‘This guy has heart, he has this-this-this-this’ — and he was right.”According to Cuban, Kalkstein urged the Mavericks to not draft another highly rated player in 2004 and vowed to quit if they overruled him to pick the player anyway. “He said, ‘If you don’t have any use for me, you’re not going to listen to me.’ “
