Mavericks owner Mark Cuban speaks with Jeffrey Katzenberg during a Lakers game in Los Angeles. Gary A. Vasquez (USA TODAY Sports via Portal Con)
The Dallas Mavericks are changing ownership. Slovenian star Luka Dončić’s team was taken over by Miriam Adelson, the widow of Sheldon Adelson, the powerful Las Vegas Sands casino magnate who died in 2021. Mark Cuban, the charismatic businessman who owns the team, sold the majority of shares to Adelsons in a deal valued at $3.5 billion. The sale, reported by The Athletic, allows Cuban to retain control over the NBA team’s athletic decisions.
The operation had not been confirmed by either party this Tuesday. However, the American media referred to a communication to the financial regulator from Las Vegas Sands, the Adelson group. The company announced that it was offering shares for sale for an amount of $2,000 million. The proceeds would be used to “finance the majority acquisition of a professional sports franchise” based on an agreement between the parties. The operation must be approved by the league, according to the notice to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC.
Miriam Adelson, a 78-year-old doctor by profession, is a major shareholder in Las Vegas Sands, the company that built the Venetian and Palazzo casinos. The group now only operates casinos in Macau and Singapore and also owns the main Las Vegas newspaper, the Review-Journal. His family has no experience in the sports world. Cuban said in 2022 that he was interested in working with Sands and advocating for the legalization of gambling in Texas, one of 29 states that do not allow sports or commercial betting.
The shares offered for sale by Sands would be enough to acquire 57% of Mavericks. Cuban would still have a significant block of shares. The alliance could fulfill one of the promises the businessman made in late 2002: building a new stadium in downtown Dallas. The building would be located in a development that would also include a casino. To prevent this, the Texas Congress must legalize gambling sometime in 2025 (it only meets every two years).
Cuban bought the Mavs 23 years ago for $285 million. At that time, most NBA clubs were losing money and the value of franchises was declining every year. The league’s total revenue was just under $2 billion after the 1998–1999 season. The businessman entered at a time when sports would experience a global resurgence thanks to television deals on cable television for local markets and the boost that social networks would give with Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006.
Dallas had among its big stars Dončić and the German Dirk Nowitzki, the first European to win the NBA MVP title. However, the team’s owner is one of the most familiar faces to basketball fans. The 65-year-old Cuban began his fortune in the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. He regularly attends games. It is common to see him in the stadium wearing the jersey and yelling at the league’s referees. This increased his public profile, which he capitalized on to become a celebrity thanks to his appearance on 16 seasons of the reality show “Shark Tank” or his involvement in new ventures such as a generic drug company. Bloomberg’s billionaires list estimates his fortune at around $6.5 billion.
Dallas has qualified for the playoffs in 18 of the 23 seasons Cuban has played. His style can be controversial. Last season, 2022-2023, the team was relegated to 11th place in the West. The NBA fined the Mavs $750,000 for missing a game against Chicago in April and holding on to a first-round draft pick that had a chance of falling into the hands of the Knicks. It’s not the first time that the businessman has paid for what is known in the league as tanking and deliberately allowed himself to win. In 2018, he spent $600,000 after confessing on a podcast that he had dinner with some of his players to convince them that they should lose to improve the team’s chances of winning would not qualify and was looking for his best position in the draft since Nowitzki’s inception in 1998. Cuban said at the time that this was a sign of being a transparent owner.
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