DALLAS — The NBA on Wednesday approved the sale of controlling interest of the Dallas Mavericks from Mark Cuban to the families that run the Las Vegas Sands casino company.
The deal was approved just shy of a month since the families of Miriam Adelson and Sivan and Patrick Dumont announced their intention to buy the club. The purchase is in the valuation range of $3.5 billion.
Patrick Dumont, Adelson’s son-in-law and president and chief operating officer of the Las Vegas Sands company, will serve as Mavericks governor. Adelson is the widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
Cuban is expected to maintain control of basketball operations, and there’s no indication the club will leave Dallas.
Cuban has said he wanted to partner with Las Vegas Sands with a long-range plan of building an arena in downtown Dallas that would also include a hotel and casino.
Gambling isn’t legal in Texas, and efforts to legalize it face steep odds. Still, Miriam Adelson has made no secret of her push to bring casino gambling to the Lone Star State.
She pumped more than $2 million last year into a political action committee, called Texas Sands, which donated lavishly to state legislators and swarmed the GOP-controlled state Capitol with lobbyists. She gave an additional $1 million separately to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
But the spending blitz failed to deliver a breakthrough this year in the Texas Legislature, where resistance to legalizing casinos runs deep.
Texas already has a billionaire NBA owner who is a casino operator, Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta, who also supports bringing casinos to his home state but has watched lawmakers sink the idea year after year.
News of the sale of the Mavs broke last month, hours after Las Vegas Sands announced that Adelson was selling $2 billion of her shares to buy an unspecified professional sports team.