Mark Cuban made the Mavericks relevant. But is his legacy rotten? | Dallas Mavericks

TThe year 2000 opened like a glow stick, showering Dallas with new money — and a new Mavericks owner, who had made his money selling his streaming site just before the Internet crash. Like the Mavs of the 1990s, Mark Cuban wasn’t polished — and he certainly wasn’t subtle. He was brash and argumentative, clashing with refs and clapping too loudly every time Dirk Nowitzki buried a three. The Internet Age, in the form of Cuban, crashed onto the field when he purchased the team for $285 million. The days of distant owners occasionally watching games from the executive boxes were over: the fan now controlled the team. Cuban had hijacked reality.

Cuban’s thesis was simple: never play by their rules. The Mavs were his start-up. He improved his diet, upgraded his hotels for away games, bought a team plane, stocked PlayStation lockers and fought NBA lawyers with the challenge of a rapper cheering hundreds of people at 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? By signing 38-year-old Dennis Rodman, of course. As a trickster, Cuban understood the show. Those early years were about making the Mavs culturally relevant. The team reached the playoffs in its first full year under Cuba. He was what has become routine for sports owners in the new millennium: a tech billionaire.

A quarter of a century later, the glow has dimmed. Cuban sold his majority stake for $3.5 billion to a figure less dreamy than a ruthless businesswoman: Miriam Adelson. Since then, as a minority owner, he has had 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 keep him busy, Cuban embarked on a media tour. He’s defended everything from the general manager now calling shots he once made, Harrison, to Clippers owner Steve Ballmer’s “no-show” employment controversy. The only thing he doesn’t seem to want to talk about is the Luka Dončić trade, a move that still haunts a large portion of Mavericks fans. Cuban seems detached, clinging to the NBA spotlight like a man afraid the lights will go out. As a Mavs owner, relevance was automatic – his mouth and moxie got the job done. At the same time, his old team is off to a terrible start under the stupid supervision of the new owner and his former general manager. The Mavericks are at the bottom of the NBA standings and calls for “Fire Nico” have increased. Many fans hold Cuban responsible for drafting Harrison and selling out the team to the bad guys.

Cuban turned a $285 million bet on the Mavericks into $3.5 billion. But how will this windfall be read in the history books? Will this be the mark of a visionary, or just another fortune diverted from American sports? When judging Cuba’s property regime, the simplest paradigms are sometimes the most revealing.

The good

The era Cuba hopes to define him, which will live as long as there is a roof on the American Airlines Center, is 2011. Dirk’s run, the one that shook Miami’s ‘Heatles’ dynasty before it even began. A title, finally. This banner is proof that his mania could turn into a championship.

But the championships do not take place 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 attracted Nowitzki — and that one day, it would attract Dončić, too. Nelson’s vision built an international pipeline that others envied and defrauded. However, Cuban was smart with the players as well as the management and looked out for them when they needed it most. Delonte West was only a Mav for one season, but Cuban made several overtures to help him get off drugs and get back on his feet. Unfortunately, Cuba could not save the West. West couldn’t save himself either.

At the zenith of the Cuban Mavericks’ reign, there was a rare sense of balance. He hired great coaches: Don Nelson brought the joy of life, Avery Johnson brought the defense and Dirk brought the postgame. Rick Carlisle brought a tactical acumen that fueled the team’s title run. Jason Kidd exploited Dončić’s inspired finale in 2024. Carlisle, in particular, was everything Cuban was not: calm and methodical. Together, they created the environment Dirk needed to become a championship legend.

More than any team change, Cuba brought relevance to Dallas basketball. Beginning in 2000-01, they reached the playoffs in 15 of 16 seasons. Their slogan, MFFL, was not a corporate brand but an identity built in South Dallas and Oak Cliff. The 1990s Mavs were horrible. The fact that Cuban pulled them out of the gutter and turned them into championship contenders is a credit to him.

The bad

But Cuban’s greatness also led to his own downfall. The same gambling instinct that made him a billionaire made him look like a slapped ass once or twice. Letting Steve Nash go in 2004 was the first big sin. Cuban didn’t want to pay an aging point guard with a bad back. Phoenix did it, and Nash became a two-time MVP who reinvented basketball alongside Mike D’Antoni on the Suns. Dallas received nothing but regrets.

It happened again with Jalen Brunson in 2022. A local guard, Dončić’s natural backcourt partner, was downgraded and released. The Knicks surged and Brunson became a star that Dallas desperately needed. Different decade, same Cuban mistake.

The hiring of Harrison, a Nike executive, as general manager in 2021 seemed radical in press releases, but he made no real contributions to the front office. Harrison made smart plays in signing Kyrie Irving and Derek Lively, but also kicked out Cuban as soon as he sold his majority stake. The championship drought in the Doncic era has Harrison’s fingerprints all over it. The Slovenian superstar’s expedition made Harrison persona non grata in Dallas — the ultimate sellout move, a middle finger to the city and the fans.

Then there were the calamities of Cuban free agency. Tyson Chandler, the defensive heart of the 2011 team, left the team because Cuban wanted cap flexibility. Michael Finley, the Mavericks’ first Cuban captain, was waived by amnesty and won a ring with San Antonio. Kristaps Porziņģis was supposed to be Dončić’s running mate; instead, he was a salary drain, injuries included, costing Dallas two first-round picks. And the crown jewel of failures: letting Nowitzki spend his twilight years surrounded by entropy and one-year rentals, all because Cuban chased free agents who never signed.

The ugly

Cuban had a penchant for wasting his draft picks on foreign-born busts, coupled with a lack of black players. There is no suggestion that this was due to prejudice on Cuban’s part, but it was often an odd aspect in a league where more than two-thirds of the players are black.

Cuba’s final act was to sell its majority stake to Adelson, heir to the casino billions and shrewd political operator. The difference is stark: Cuban was a die-hard fan who lived and died by every win and loss, and cared as much about the Mavs as he did about the people in the cheap seats. Adelson, on the other hand, seems 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 case of the Mavs, some see Adelson’s investment in the team as a stepping stone toward legalizing gambling in Texas. Of all the people Cuba could have sold the team to, why did he have to cash in on someone many fans consider a true supervillain?

Then there is the decadence that worsened during the time when Cuba was majority owner. In 2018, a Sports Illustrated report exploded the illusion that Cuba was a benevolent disruptor. The Mavericks front office was reportedly a quagmire of harassment and misconduct. Cuban denied knowledge of any misconduct, but admitted he bore some responsibility. “I’m embarrassed, to be honest with you, that this 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 reporting allegations of sexual misconduct by a Mavericks executive. Bob Voulgaris, the Cuban player taken from his Twitter feed, transformed himself into a shadow general manager, angering Dončić and curdling the team from within. While one Mav, Chandler Parsons, played the role of recruiter in a way that blurred the line between player and executive, pushing Cuban into failed contracts. But nothing beats selling the team to Adelson. Ultimately, Cuban basketball’s rebellion ended with a handshake with the establishment he once mocked and swore to overthrow.