Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images and Reuters
As far as his fellow NBA owner plutocrats are concerned, Mark Cuban has been falling behind. Once, Cuban was a symbol of excessive tech wealth’s entrance into the league, pumping cash and employing a newfangled analytic approach to turn the Dallas Mavericks, an ignoble afterthought, into a prestige franchise with a hot new stadium and training facility, a staging ground for the career of the mighty Dirk Nowitzki, and an NBA champion. But the owners who followed Cuban from tech into the league were as obscenely wealthy and enamored with their own intelligence.
Last year, Cuban spoke of his dreams for the future of the Mavs: a new arena (The current arena, American Airlines Center, is only a little more than twenty years old) that forms the center of a gigantic luxury gambling resort in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. A vertically integrated entertainment money extraction system, deep in the heart of Northeast Texas.
There are some obstacles to Cuban’s dream. Building a new arena is expensive, and taxpayers probably won’t be keen on footing the bill to replace a twenty-year-old stadium. Also gambling is still illegal in Texas so a big casino on non-reservation land isn’t going to happen without a little arm twisting. Arm twisting like that costs a lot of money and would require deep connections to the Texas state government, which would mean getting in deep with the Texas Republican Party, the sort of enterprise that Cuban, who sees himself as somewhat more benevolent than, for instance, the Koch Brothers, might find distasteful.