The NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and Biap announced today that they have paired up to develop what they believe is the first-ever pro sports team widget.

The TV widget will feature in-depth and real-time game statistics, scores, breaking news, video highlights, interviews and game play-by-play. The goals is to have the Mavericks’ team widget in place at the beginning of next season and to develop a widget template that can be used across other professional and college sports teams.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is a well-known advocate of cutting-edge technology. He is also the chairman of HDNet, which he co-founded.

“Partnering with Biap to produce the Mavs Team Widget is great for us,” said Cuban. “We believe in the future of the EBIF platform and in interactive television. It is a natural extension to give Mavs fans and HDNet viewers the best experience we can if they’re not in a seat at the game.”

The cable industry is gearing up for deployments of Enhanced Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) applications and technologies, as evidenced by the number of EBIF demonstrations last month at The Cable Show in Washington, D.C. EBIF can be deployed on most legacy set-top boxes that are already in customers homes. Once tru2way becomes more widespread, it’s expected that some EBIF applications will move over to that environment, but in the meantime EBIF allows cable subscribers to get used to using interactive features on their TVs.

Biap said it’s the first company to deploy EBIF market-wide on Cisco set-top boxes, including low-memory legacy units. Last year it inked a license deal with Time Warner Cable for its EBIF user agent (story here).

“We are thrilled to work with Mark Cuban and the Mavericks to expand the world of EBIF applications and interactive television,” said Patrick Peters, executive vice president of Biap. “Mark and the Mavericks provide a unique leadership position that will help establish not only a new platform for the Mavericks, but help the development of the industry and support the open standards necessary to make it happen.”

Financial terms of the deal between the Mavericks and Biap were not available.