Mark Cuban fired a big shot at ESPN by revoking the media credentials for 2 of its veteran NBA reporters

Kevork Djansezian/Getty

The Dallas Mavericks revoked the season media credentials of two Dallas-based ESPN writers, Marc Stein and Tim MacMahon, according to multiple reports.

While it is not unheard of for teams to revoke credentials over coverage, there doesn’t appear to be anything that either Stein or MacMahon has written recently that would justify this type of action. Rather, it appears the decision was made because the two weren’t covering the Mavericks enough.

According to Tim Cato of MavsMoneyBall, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban made the decision because he was upset about MacMahon’s new role at ESPN this season. For the past seven years, MacMahon had covered the Mavericks beat full time, whereas this season he has transitioned to writing more broadly about the NBA on a national level, and thus covers Cuban’s team less often.

That explanation doesn’t account for Stein, who has been a national NBA writer for years and hasn’t been on the Mavs beat for a decade. One possible explanation is that Cuban is unhappy with writers using his team’s home games to cover other teams.

Richard Deitsch of Sports Illustrated noted that neither reporter had been credentialed for the two most recent Mavericks home games:

Prominent Dallas sportswriter Tim Cowlishaw said Cuban was “being a moron”:

Cuban, meanwhile, didn’t comment on the matter, saying only this:

Both ESPN and the NBA released bland statements saying they were committed to working together and expediently resolving the matter.

This isn’t the first time that Cuban has lashed out against media covering his team. In 2008, Deadspin reported he banned all bloggers from the locker room because he was unhappy with a post written by none other than MacMahon. That was resolved quickly, and this probably will be, too.

The NBA season is not even one month old, though the Mavs are struggling out of the gate at 1-5.