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Mark Cuban was fined (Gasp!) the other day (What took them so long?) for felonious sarcasm (No!) directed at the man who runs the National Basketball Association (Mirabile dictu!).

Cuban says something on his Weblog, blogmaverick.com, about the NBA starting its new season last Tuesday ("I won't say what I really think about the genius that started the season on Election Day since it's probably the same person that started the season on Halloween in previous years.") thereby costing him a sure Opening Night sellout and an undisclosed sum of money he had to sweep his eight-iron under the refrigerator to collect.

But here's the twist. Cubes, if he doesn't mind our newfound familiarity, asked this musical question on his blog: "Do the customers and fans of the NBA or other leagues feel it makes the league appear strong, weaker or unaffected when a player, owner, coach, GM or executive publicly criticizes the league?"

Well, Laughing Boy, let me explain it to you this way. Those crab puffs and brie wheels at David Stern's office Christmas party don't pay for themselves.

This is an interesting way for Cuban to attack what he clearly considers a problem --- polling an audience already predisposed by their very choice of Internet sites to see it his way, as though this were just another red state/blue state thing. Though he's doing it with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, he's clearly tired of writing checks to SternCo.

And yet, we suspect (Because Cubes' last stupid day on earth might have been his third birthday) he already knows not only what his audience will tell him, but the real reason he gets fined in the first place: It is the only way for the Emperor-Commissioner to do what gets done every day in every tavern in America -- for the bartender to tell the customers that it's just time to shut the hell up.

It's not closing time, and the customer isn't nearly rowdy enough to be referred to the bouncer, but the bartender has clearly had enough on the subject at hand, and is changing the subject the only way he knows how without pulling out the .45 from below the cash register.

You see, as Cubes well knows (Don't you, Mark?), he is rich enough to have Stern delivered to him garnished with a Granny Smith wedged between his jaws for Thanksgiving presentation. His compatriots on the NBA's Owners Row, however, don't have a burning desire to help him, let alone join him. This is, for them, just another local matter. The precocious boy spouts off, the dad grounds him, and the boy yells out the window at his friends, "Hey, let's poll the neighborhood: 'Is Dad a big jerkface, or not?' "

Now he's doing it on a more ingenious level -- most owners would either pay and grumble, or call Stern "the village idiot" and then pay and grumble. Cubes is going to pay, but he's going to side-door the question of whether his punishment is warranted, as though the vote is some sort of binding plebiscite rather than just the kid in his room telling his friends to agree with him about Dad.

Me, I'm thinking that opening the NBA season on Election Night probably wasn't the acme of marketing genius, either, although I can't say that the unused seats in Dallas trouble me enough to care one way or another. I also can't say that Cuban losing the top crust of his petty cash drawer is an issue of any great depth. Frankly, I prefer the amusement of watching him and Davey Boy stick their tongues out at each other from eight states away.

And I suspect they both know it, too. I suspect it's another form of marketing -- the NBA's resident billionaire gadfly puts a stick in the spokes, the NBA's resident godhead calls him on it, the gadfly says something sarcastic about the godhead, and here I am, 800 words closer to vacation.

It's a hell of a great country that way, isn't it?

But we patiently await the results of Cubes' polling anyway, just because he wants to prove a point -- that punishing him won't modify his behavior on scientific as well as willful grounds. But he may be forgetting the other equally valid point, that Stern has no other way to give him the bartender's shove than to take his beer money.

Although just hearing Stern say "Shut the hell up," maybe on the Christmas Day pregame show, might be the most ingenious response yet. It won't work any more than Cubes' poll, but it will get me another 800 words closer to vacation, and what sensible American wouldn't agree that that's a laudable goal?

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com