(Dallas) NBA executives on Wednesday approved the sale of the majority stake of Mark Cuban’s Dallas Mavericks to the families that run the Las Vegas Sands casino company.
The deal was finalized a little less than a month after the families of Miriam Adelson and Sivan and Patrick Dumont announced their intention to buy the club. The purchase is valued at approximately $3.5 billion.
Patrick Dumont, Adelson’s son-in-law and president and chief operating officer of Las Vegas Sands, will be the Mavericks’ governor. Adelson is the widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
Cuban is expected to retain control of basketball operations, and there is no indication the club will leave Dallas.
Cuban said he wants to partner with Las Vegas Sands on a long-term project to build an arena in downtown Dallas that would also include a hotel and casino.
Gambling is not legal in Texas, and efforts to legalize it face significant challenges. Despite everything, Miriam Adelson has never hidden her desire to introduce casino games to Texas.
Last year, she pumped more than $2 million into a political action committee called Texas Sands that made lavish donations to state lawmakers and sent lobbyists to the state Capitol. State, where the Republican Party is in the majority. Adelson separately gave an additional $1 million to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
But this spending blitz failed to make a breakthrough this year in the Texas Legislature, where resistance to casino legalization is very strong.
Texas already has a billionaire NBA owner who operates a casino, Tilman Fertitta with the Houston Rockets. Fertitta also favors bringing casinos to his state, but he has seen lawmakers reject the idea year after year.
News of the Mavericks sale broke last month, hours after Las Vegas Sands announced that Adelson was selling two billion dollars of his stock to buy an unspecified professional sports team.
It remains to be seen how the sale will affect Cuban’s place in the spotlight.
The 65-year-old Cuban has been a highly visible owner almost from the day he bought the team in 2000. He has never been shy about speaking his mind, meeting for many years with reporters as he worked out on an exercise machine before most home games.
The NBA has fined Cuban millions of dollars over the years, often for his criticism of officiating.
The Mavericks were one of the worst franchises in professional sports during the 1990s, before becoming one of the best under Cuban’s leadership and with the help of star forward Dirk Nowitzki.
A member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, Nowitzki was the leader of the team that won the NBA championship in 2011.