Friends, the most honest conversation the NBA has ever had about itself just broke wide open - and it took two of the most powerful men in the sport publicly disagreeing to get it started.

Mark Cuban, the billionaire former owner of the Dallas Mavericks, published a lengthy and remarkably candid defense of tanking this week that directly challenges Commissioner Adam Silver's increasingly aggressive stance against teams deliberately losing games. And if you want to understand the real forces driving this fight, you need to know what Silver allegedly said behind closed doors.

According to reporting from Yahoo Sports, Silver himself admitted that the crackdown on tanking was partly driven by pressure from angry gambling companies. When coaches bench starters with no advance warning, gamblers lose money on outcomes they couldn't have anticipated. The gambling companies complained. The league responded.

Let that sink in. The NBA's anti-tanking policy may be less about competitive integrity and more about protecting the sport's relationships with sportsbooks.

Cuban's response was to bypass the diplomatic niceties entirely. In a post that reads less like a PR statement and more like a man finally saying what he's been thinking for years, he made several arguments that the league's gatekeepers would rather not hear.

First, he admitted it: "We didn't tank often. Only a few times over 23 years, but when we did, our fans appreciated it. And it got us to where we could improve, trade up to get Luka and improve our team."

Here is a former NBA owner - one of the most visible, most engaged owners in the history of the league - confirming what everyone already knew but nobody with power would say. The tank for Luka Doncic was real. And it worked.

But Cuban's most interesting argument wasn't about tanking itself. It was about what the NBA is actually selling. "The NBA has lately been misguided thinking that fans want to see their teams compete every night with a chance to win. It's never been that way," he wrote. "When I got into the NBA, they thought they were in the basketball business. They aren't. They are in the business of creating experiences for fans."

And then the kicker: "You know who cares the least about tanking? A parent who can't afford to bring their 3 kids to a game and buy their kids a jersey of their favorite player. Tanking isn't the issue. Affordability and quality of game presentation are."

Now, I have pet peeves. Tanking is one of them. I've gone on record more times than I can count saying that I think teams that deliberately lose are spitting in the face of the fans who buy tickets and merchandise. I believe that with every fiber of my being.

But I also have to be honest: Cuban is asking the right questions about the NBA's real priorities. If the anti-tanking push is being driven by gambling company profits rather than fan welfare, that's a story worth telling.

The fight between Cuban and Silver is a proxy for the fight over what the NBA wants to be. And for the first time, that fight is happening in public.