Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is funding a human growth hormone (HGH) study to determine what effect, if any, the banned substance has on athletes recovering from injuries. 

Cuban spoke in the past about his curiosity as to whether HGH could quicken an athlete's return from injury, and on Thursday he announced he would help finance a potential university study to find out.

"It'll be a two-year study that applies HGH to injuries preoperative to postoperative injury recovery," Cuban said, via ESPN.  "So if you're able to retain more muscle going into an operation because you're working out and HGH helps your muscle.  And you're able to regain it faster, then we cut the recovery time.  ...

"I just want to know what the reality is.  And if we can improve recovery time, obviously that's a plus for all of us, but there was never any basis in fact for not allowing it for use [while recovering from injuries].  It was all marketing.  So let's find out.  Let's find out what's real and not real."

Cuban wouldn't specify what type of injury the study would look at, although a possibility could be ACL tears -- one of the most common, season-ending injuries in sports.

"...It'll be geared around one type of injury that has hundreds of thousands of examples a year," Cuban said.  "So we'll be to do a placebo environment without hurting anybody, right?  So here's the way we do it now.  And here's how we do it with HGH.  So hopefully it will accelerate recovery."

He also declined to name where the study would take place.  Because the study needs approval from both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), a timetable wasn't available.