It’s been a little more than a year since the Dallas Mavericks traded Luka Dončić, and they haven’t had a quiet moment since. Between their stunning lottery victory and subsequent selection of Cooper Flagg, Nico Harrison’s firing in November and last week’s trade of Anthony Davis, Dallas has been at the center of the NBA’s drama practically nonstop for the past 53 weeks, and just when it seemed like the Davis trade might be a chance for things to calm down and the fanbase to turn the page, Marc Stein dropped a potential bombshell on Monday.
According to the Dallas-based insider, a group of local investors has “registered tangible interest in partnering with former majority owner Mark Cuban to try to buy the franchise back from the Dumont and Adelson families.” Now, in theory, this should be a non-story. Miriam Adelson and Patrick Dumont own the Dallas Mavericks. They are not known to be considering a sale. If they don’t want to sell the team, they don’t have to. A source close to Dumont told Stein that “the family remains excited about the future of the franchise and the Cooper Flagg era.” That should be the end of it.
But this is, of course, the NBA, a league in which the tiniest morsel can launch 1,000 rumors. And sure enough, we got plenty of them after Stein’s reporting. So, what does any of this have to do with NBA expansion, Las Vegas, and the dream that Dončić might eventual return to Dallas (a scheme some fans refer to as “Project 2028”)? We’ll attempt to explain it, but keep in mind, we’re several significant and unlikely developments away from having to take any of this too seriously, but if Cuban and these investors are trying, it’s at least worth taking a look.
So… would Dumont and Adelson sell the Mavericks?
At this point, there is no reason to believe that they would. There has been no reporting, and a lot of the fan backlash from last season has died down since Nico Harrison was fired and Flagg emerged as a genuine franchise player. This ownership group purchased the team at a roughly $3.5 billion valuation, and it thus far appears to have been a strong investment. The most recent Forbes franchise valuations projected the Mavericks as being worth $5.1 billion. Considering the purchase took place only a bit more than two years ago, that’s tremendous growth.
So, why would anyone believe a sale is at all plausible? The answer lies in the team’s arena, and more importantly, the surrounding development. The Dumonts and Adelsons own the Las Vegas Sands Corp., a casino and resort company headquartered in Las Vegas. In 2022, it sold its two Las Vegas casinos, the Palazzo and The Venetian, leaving it, according to its website, with five resorts in Macao and another in Singapore. In October of 2026, the Mavericks will face the Houston Rockets in a pair of preseason games in Macao, at the Venetian Arena, which is owned by the Las Vegas Sands Corp.
The Mavericks’ lease with the American Airlines Center ends in 2031. The Mavericks are currently attempting to get a new arena built. The Las Vegas Sands Corp. is also attempting to build a resort in Dallas. While the two projects do not necessarily have to be linked, the idea here would be that such a resort and casino could also include an arena for the Mavericks, creating a massive real estate development for Dumont and Adelson in what has been a growing trend in the NBA arena space.
There’s just one problem here: casino gambling is not currently legal in Texas. In order for it to become legal, the Texas Constitution would need to be amended, and in order for that to happen, two-thirds of the state legislature would need to agree to send the idea to the voters, who would then vote in a statewide referendum. Maybe that happens. Maybe it doesn’t.
Do you know where gambling is not only legal, but essential to the local economy? Las Vegas, the city that lends its name to the Sands Corporation currently attempting to build this resort in Texas. When the Dončić trade happened, it was followed by conspiracy theories suggesting that it was meant to set up a possible relocation of the Mavericks to Nevada. Dumont quickly shut down those rumors last February. “The Dallas Mavericks are not moving to Las Vegas,” Dumont told The Dallas Morning News. “There is no question in that. That is the answer, unequivocally. The Dallas Mavericks are the Dallas Mavericks and they will be in Dallas.”
That should shut all of this down, right? Well, probably. But what if there were a potential workaround? Conveniently enough, a separate report on Sunday created speculation about one.
What does any of this have to do with NBA expansion?
Late Sunday night, after the Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl, Brad Townsend of the Dallas Morning News published the following tweet. “Think it’s going to be an extra-great year for Seattle. I’m hearing NBA Board of Governors likely to vote on expanding by two teams this summer and Las Vegas and Seattle are favored.”
Now, all of a sudden, it seems as though Vegas could get a team without relocation involved. Less than a day later, Stein reported that those local Dallas investors are interested in partnering with Cuban to buy the Mavericks back. The timing has led to pretty rampant speculation. Say the current owners of the Mavericks are pessimistic about getting gambling legalized in Texas and therefore building a resort in which a new arena would reside. Could they then pivot off of the Dallas market, sell the team to locals and using the proceeds to buy a new team in Las Vegas, where their corporation is based and they would presumably find fewer hurdles to getting an arena and casino built?
Amazingly, there is some precedent for a move like this. In 1978, John Y. Brown and Irv Levin traded franchises. Levin owned the Boston Celtics, but wanted Brown’s Buffalo Braves so he could move them to California, where they became the Clippers. In 1999, Major League Baseball experienced a similar franchise sale. Jeffrey Loria owned the Montreal Expos, but he sold the team to Major League Baseball so that he could buy the Florida Marlins from John Henry. Two years later, Henry took the proceeds from the Marlins sale and bought the Boston Red Sox. Moves like this aren’t exactly common, but they’ve happened.
There are still far too many moving parts to consider any of this plausible, though. The most obvious holdup here would be price. We don’t yet know how much the NBA would want as an expansion fee for a team in Las Vegas. Would it be more than the Mavericks are worth? If so, would the current Mavericks owners be interested in spending the difference? Would the NBA even want to participate in something like this? We can’t say. Expansion hasn’t even been approved yet. And besides, remember what that source told Stein. Dumont and Adelson couldn’t take Flagg with them to Vegas.
We’ve already done quite a bit of speculation here, and we haven’t even gotten to the Dallas fan fantasy of undoing the Dončić trade yet.
Wait, undoing the Dončić trade?
The two people ultimately responsible for trading Luka Dončić were Nico Harrison and Patrick Dumont. Harrison is gone. If Dumont eventually joins him, that theoretically opens the door to reconcilation. If Cuban were involved in a new ownership group, he’d seemingly come with significant recruiting advantages having actually drafted Dončić and worked with him for years.
Dončić, obviously, is currently a member of the Los Angeles Lakers. Last offseason, he signed a contract extension. That deal only added two years to previous deal, though. He currently has a player option for the 2028-29 season, which was intentional as it allows him to become a free agent after his 10th season. He could therefore sign with any other team on a max deal starting at 35% of the salary cap, the highest possible figure, though he could only get a five-year deal (compared to four elsewhere) and 8% annual raises (compared to 5% elsewhere) with his incumbent team, which will presumably be the Lakers.
However, the Lakers failed to win a playoff series last season. As of right now, the Lakers have the sixth-best odds to win the Western Conference, trailing the Thunder, Nuggets, Spurs, Rockets and Timberwolves. They will have three first-round picks to trade this offseason along with potentially $50 million or so in cap space after re-signing Austin Reaves, but Reaves is the only other player on the team that appears to have a certain future, and even he has to contend with a shaky defensive fit next to Dončić. In other words, the Lakers have to rebuild most of their roster if they hope to give Dončić a winner in the near future. They have tools to do that with, but those tools have limits, and if they aren’t in the championship picture by 2028, Dončić has the ability to leave.
We know he didn’t want to leave Dallas in the first place. Reports indicated he had just purchased a large home there right before he was dealt. The Mavericks, at least for now, have very clean books in the summer of 2028. As of right now, they only have three players under contract: Daniel Gafford and P.J. Washington, who started alongside Dončić as the Mavericks reached the 2024 NBA Finals, and Flagg, who, at the rate he is currently developing, not only figures to be better than anyone the Lakers currently have, but would almost unquestionably be the best teammate available to Luka in the summer of 2028.
Is a sale of the Mavericks absolutely necessary for Dončić to consider a return? This is where we point out that LeBron James returned to the Cleveland Cavaliers four years after Dan Gilbert posted a scathing letter about him following his departure for the Miami Heat. James and Gilbert sat down and hashed things out in 2014. James returned even with Gilbert still controlling the team. Dončić technically could as well, though the difference here is obviously that Gilbert never traded James, whereas Dumont did trade Dončić. We are still much too far from 2028 to speculate any further about where Dončić might want to play. For all we know, the Lakers make some strong moves in the next year or so and win a championship that renders all of this moot. But at the very least, you’d imagine he’d rather play for a Cuban-led group than Dumont again.
So is any of this going to happen?
Probably not! But this is the NBA. The Dončić trade itself is exactly the sort of thing that leads to speculation like this. Crazy things happen in this league. Dallas would need about a half-dozen crazy things to happen in the next few years for any of this to become at all plausible, but if nothing else, none of those individual things seem crazier now than a Dončić-for-Anthony Davis trade would have 13 months ago. Once you open that door, conspiracies are never going to stop rushing through it.
But until the current ownership in Dallas expresses any interest in selling the team, we should probably assume that they don’t plan to do so. Inertia is a powerful force in sports and in business. The likeliest outcome is usually the one that’s currently in place. Adelson and Dumont own the Mavericks. They’ve weathered the worst of the post-Dončić storm, and while they may not be as popular in Dallas as Cuban was, they have a budding star in Flagg to build around and the potential for some very lucrative development in Texas if things go right for them off of the court. It’s a fun concept. We’re a long way from it being a realistic one.
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