Cuban Says “Nothing’s Really Changed” after Selling Majority Stake in Mavs
By Rashad Miller
Hours before the Dallas Mavericks took on the Cleveland Cavaliers, entrepreneur Mark Cuban did his normal routine of shooting baskets on the hardwood floor of the American Airlines Center. The night was going like any other night, except earlier that day the NBA announced that Cuban sold a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks to the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. The group is led by Miriam Adelson,
The sale was reportedly for $3.5 billion and Cuban still owns 27 percent of the Mavericks. Mark Cuban humorously plugged his hit television show, Shark Tank (which he said he will still be a “shark” on for one more season), which he reminded us of is on “Friday nights on ABC” while giving a modified quote he uses on the show by saying that “27 percent of a watermelon is a whole lot better than 77 percent of a grape, so the value of the asset went up significantly”. As of October 2023, the Mavs are valued at $4.5 billion according to Forbes.
When asked how he felt after the sale was finalized, the Shark Tank host replied that, “nothing’s really changed but his bank account” and that he feels “really good.” He added that “it’s a great partnership” and “it’s what the team needs on the court and off”. He assured us that he will “still be overseeing the basketball side” of the day-to-day operations for the Mavs. The Adelson family’s focus will be more on real estate which includes building a new arena in Dallas.
Cuban complimented the family saying that, “having [partners] like Patrick, Sivan and Miriam and their ability to build and to redevelop the arena and whatever comes next beyond that just puts us in a much better position to compete”. He would say his reasoning to sell a large stake in a team he’s been majority owner of since 2000 was, “they’re not basketball people [and] I’m not [a] real estate [person]. That’s why I did it. I could have gotten more money [selling the team] to somebody else”.
When Mark Cuban bought the Mavericks for $285 million, it was at the height of the internet boom of the late 90s that made him go from being courtside at Reunion Arena to a multimillionaire with the assets to acquire the franchise. Cuban admitted that the sale is also him adapting to the times. “I’m also a realist and I also I’m self aware. When I first bought the team, I knew more about technology, the internet, all the streaming and everything compared to anybody else in the NBA [at the time]. I had a real advantage. Now, 23-24 years later, that’s not the advantage anymore.”
When asked why he didn’t keep his majority stake of the Mavs to pass along to his children to operate like Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, Cuban again responded with a sense of awareness, “you look at the age of my kids, they’re 14, 17, and 20. I know I look 25 and act 15 but I’m 65. If you just do the math, if it takes twenty years for one of them to really learn or any one of them to really want to do it then if they decide that they don’t want to do it, all of a sudden I’m 85 years old and my kids decide that they’re onto bigger and better things. So, I wanted to get ahead of it.”
Cuban would conclude the statement by saying that, “if I would’ve probably had kids twenty years earlier like Jerry did then it might have been different. It’s just the math is the math, you know. If nothing, like I said, I’m self aware and I don’t want to be in a position where I look back, and say what I ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda’. If you get to pick the partnership you needed and wanted. I couldn’t have called it any better”.
The sale is also an attempt to not just build the Mavericks a new arena, but bring legalized gambling to the Lone Star State. “I think it’s the right thing for the state of Texas. I don’t care so much about sports betting, there really isn’t a ton of interest [for] me. I don’t want to speak for Miriam and Patrick and Sivon, but if you look at destination resort casinos, the casino part of it is tiny, relative to the whole bigger destination aspect of it. Could you imagine building the Venetian in Dallas? I mean, that would be insane. That would just change everything”, Cuban said.
It is reported that the Sands group owns the land that was once the site of Texas Stadium in Irving, which was the home field of the Dallas Cowboys until 2008 before the NFL franchise moved to Arlington the following year. The late Sheldon Adelson changed political views in 1996 and he and Miriam gave large donations to the Republican Party for years before his passing in 2021.
He and his wife reportedly donated more than $500 million to Republican campaigns and super Political Action Committees. These factors could see the new majority owners not only bring gambling to Texas but a multipurpose casino and resort to North Texas in the near future.
Follow Rashad Miller on all social media @theuncoolurban for more sports content as well as his Youtube channel under the same name.
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