"Exactly six months from last Friday, an estimated 10,500 athletes from 204 nations will march into the new stadium in east London.

Flags will be raised. Anthems will be sung. And Queen Elizabeth II, who last performed this chore 36 years ago in Montreal, will utter the 15 words, officially opening the Games of the XXX Olympiad.

I'm going to guess that Mark Cuban won't be watching.

Quite the contrary. The owner of the NBA champion Dallas Mavericks made headlines last week when an ESPN website quoted him as calling the NBA's endorsement of the Games' basketball competition "the epitome of stupidity."

The crux of Cuban's problem, it seems, is that he and his fellow NBA owners are forced to allow the Olympics to use the services of their star players. And if a player should get hurt while competing for his country, it's the NBA owner -- not the queen nor the International Olympic Committee -- who still has to pay the player's multimillion-dollar salary.

I'll save my rebuttal for later. But for now, let it be noted that a goodly number of U.S. media folks leapt to Cuban's defense."