The year 2000 cracked open like a glow stick, flooding Dallas with new money – and a new Mavericks owner, who had made his money selling his streaming site just before the dot-com crash. Like the 1990s Mavs, Mark Cuban wasn’t polished – and he sure as hell wasn’t subtle. He was brash and argumentative, clashed with refs, and clapped too hard whenever Dirk Nowitzki buried a three. The internet age, in the form of Cuban, crashed courtside when he bought the team for $285m. Gone was the era of distant owners watching occasional games from the executive boxes: the fan was in control of the team now. Cuban had hacked reality.
Cuban’s thesis was simple: never play by their rules. The Mavs were his start-up. He improved nutrition, upgraded hotels for road games, bought a team plane, filled lockers with PlayStations, and fought the NBA’s lawyers with the defiance of a rapper clapping off hundos in a strip club. This went against the NBA’s old boys’ club. For all his dot-com cache, Cuban was punk in practice.
His first order of business? Signing 38-year-old Dennis Rodman, of course. As a trickster, Cuban understood spectacle. Those early years were about making the Mavs culturally relevant. The team made the playoffs in their first full year under Cuban. He was what has become routine for sports owners in the new millennium: a tech billionaire.
A quarter century later, the glow has dimmed. Cuban sold his majority ownership stake for $3.5bn to a figure less a dreamer than a ruthless businesswoman: Miriam Adelson. Since then, as a minority owner, he has little to do with the day-to-day running of the team, and has been sidelined by the general manager he once hired, Nico Harrison.
Without the Mavericks to occupy him, Cuban has drifted on to a media tour. He’s defended everything from the GM who now calls the shots he once made, Harrison, to Clippers owner Steve Ballmer’s “no-show” job controversy. The one thing he doesn’t seem to want to talk about is the Luka Dončić trade, a move that still haunts much of the Mavericks fanbase. Cuban seems unmoored, clinging to the NBA spotlight like a man afraid the lights will dim. As Mavs owner, relevance was automatic – his mouth and moxie did the work. At the same time, his former team is off to a horrendous start under the dim-witted supervision of new ownership and his former general manager. The Mavericks are near the bottom of the NBA standings, and calls to “Fire Nico” have ramped back up. Many fans hold Cuban responsible for hand-picking Harrison and selling the team to the bad guys.
Cuban turned a $285m gamble on the Mavericks into $3.5bn. But how will that windfall be read in the history books? Will it be as the mark of a visionary, or just another fortune sucked from American sports? To judge Cuban’s ownership tenure, sometimes the simplest paradigms are the most revealing.
The good
The time that Cuban hopes will define him, that will live as long as there’s a roof on the American Airlines Center, is 2011. Dirk’s run, the one that rocked Miami’s “Heatles” dynasty before it even began. A title, finally. That banner is proof that his mania could be distilled into a championship.
But championships don’t happen in a vacuum. Cuban could have fired general manager Donnie Nelson after the Mavs lost in the 2006 NBA finals. But he knew that Nelson’s eye for foreign talent had already brought in Nowitzki – and one day it would bring in Dončić too. Nelson’s vision set up an international pipeline others envied and ripped off. Cuban was smart with players as well as executives though, and looked out for them when they needed it the most. Delonte West was a Mav for just one season, but Cuban made multiple overtures to help him kick drugs and get back on his feet. Sadly, Cuban couldn’t save West. Nor could West save himself.
At the zenith of Cuban’s Mavericks reign, there was a rare sense of balance. He hired excellent coaches: Don Nelson brought a lust for life, Avery Johnson brought defense, and Dirk’s post game. Rick Carlisle brought tactical nous that fueled the team’s title run. Jason Kidd harnessed the Dončić-inspired finals run in 2024. Carlisle, in particular, was everything Cuban wasn’t – quiet and methodical. Together, they engendered the environment Dirk needed to become championship myth.
More than any roster move, though, Cuban gave Dallas basketball relevance. Starting in 2000-01, they reached the playoffs in 15 out of 16 seasons. Their slogan, MFFL, wasn’t corporate branding but an identity built in South Dallas and Oak Cliff. The 1990s Mavs were godawful. That Cuban yanked them out of the gutter and turned them into championship contenders is to his immense credit.
Mark Cuban in 2000, his first year as owner of the Mavericks. He often came across as more of a fan than an owner. Photograph: Huy Nguyen/Associated Press
The bad
But Cuban’s greatness also led to his own undoing. The same gambler’s instinct that made him a billionaire had him looking once or twice like a slapped ass. Letting Steve Nash walk in 2004 was the first great sin. Cuban didn’t want to pay an aging point guard with a bad back. Phoenix did, and Nash turned into a two-time MVP who reinvented basketball alongside Mike D’Antoni at the Suns. Dallas got nothing back but regret.
It happened again with Jalen Brunson in 2022. A homegrown guard, Dončić’s natural backcourt partner, was lowballed and let go. The Knicks pounced, and Brunson turned into a star Dallas desperately needed. Different decade, same error by Cuban.
Hiring Harrison, a Nike executive, as general manager in 2021 sounded radical in press releases but he brought no real front office chops. Harrison made some smart plays by signing Kyrie Irving and Dereck Lively, but also pushed Cuban out as soon as he sold his majority ownership stake. The championship drought in the Dončić era has Harrison’s fingerprints all over it. Shipping off the Slovenian superstar made Harrison persona non grata in Dallas – the ultimate sellout move, a middle finger to the city and the fans.
Then there were Cuban’s free-agency calamities. Tyson Chandler, defensive heart of the 2011 team, walked out the door because Cuban wanted cap flexibility. Michael Finley, Cuban’s initial Mavericks captain, was waived via amnesty and won a ring with San Antonio. Kristaps Porziņģis was supposed to be Dončić’s running mate; instead, he was a salary dump, injuries included, costing Dallas two first-round picks. And the crown jewel of misfires: leaving Nowitzki to spend his twilight surrounded by entropy and one-year rentals, all because Cuban chased free-agents who never signed.
The ugly
Cuban had a penchant for wasting draft picks on foreign-born busts, coupled with a lack of Black players. There’s no suggestion that was due to prejudice on Cuban’s part, but it was often an odd look in a league where more than two-thirds of players are Black.
Cuban’s last act was to sell his majority stake to Adelson, the heir to casino billions and a sharp political operator. The difference is glaring: Cuban was a diehard fan who lived and died with every win and loss, who cared as much about the Mavs as the people in the cheap seats. Adelson, by contrast, appears to value political influence over basketball. The Mavs are just another part of an empire that includes the Las Vegas Sands casino business, the Adelson Family Foundation charity and a close relationship with Donald Trump. In the Mavs’ case, some see Adelson’s investment in the team as as a stepping stone towards legalizing gambling in Texas. Of all the people Cuban could have sold the team to, why did he have to cash out to someone who many fans see as a real-life supervillain?
Then there’s the decay that festered during Cuban’s time as majority owner. In 2018, a Sports Illustrated report detonated the illusion of Cuban as the benevolent disruptor. The Mavericks’ front office was allegedly a morass of harassment and misconduct. Cuban denied he knew of any misconduct but admitted he bore some responsibility. “I’m embarrassed, to be honest with you, that it happened under my ownership, and it needs to be fixed. Period. End of story,” he said at the time.
There were other problems. Donnie Nelson sued the team, accusing Cuban of retaliation after he reported allegations of sexual misconduct by a Mavericks executive. Bob Voulgaris, the gambler Cuban dragged in off his Twitter feed, morphed into a shadow GM – angering Dončić and curdling the team from the inside. While a Mav, Chandler Parsons, played recruiter in ways that blurred the line between player and executive, pushing Cuban toward flopped contracts. But nothing outweighs selling the team to Adelson. In the end, Cuban’s basketball rebellion ended with a handshake deal with the establishment class he once mocked and swore to subvert.
