On paper, Mark Cuban has withdrawn from the roles that placed him firmly in the public eye: He is no longer the majority owner and governor of the Mavericks and recently stepped down from his starring role on .
And yet, Cuban is still everywhere. He took a break from debating Pablo Torre over the ongoing probe into Steve Ballmer, Kawhi Leonard and the Clippers to appear on the ' podcast with former NBA stars Channing Frye, Richard Jefferson and Kendrick Perkins. In light of his 2023 sale of the Mavericks—which ultimately resulted in the franchise's stunning trade of Luka Dončić to the Lakers—Frye asked whether Cuban would be interested in buying NBA team (20:42 mark in the video below).
Even though he has pledged his loyalty to Dallas, the answer was definitively not a no—though he did downplay the long-rumored idea of league expansion and his potential to buy a team that way.
“Yeah, he competitive part of me says absolutely,” Cuban said. “It’s just like, O.K., if this is the way it turned out, but I don’t think there is going to be expansion the way everybody expected. And who knows if franchises come up?"
Interestingly, Cuban brought up that he is close friends with Tom Dundon, owner of the NHL's Hurricanes who is set to buy the Trail Blazers, and revealed that Dundon mentioned the possibility of Cuban buying into Portland ownership. Ultimately, Cuban says the only way that he's jumping to another franchise is as majority owner.
“He’s not as outgoing as I am, and he runs the NHL team in that kind of way. We had a real brief conversation, but I’m like unless I can be majority owner, I’m not going to do it.”
After selling his majority share of the Mavericks to Miriam Adelson and Patrick Dumont, Cuban explained to the podcast last October that he moved on as governor because he no longer felt that he had the inherent advantages that were true at the start of the century when he first bought the team. He also did not want to pressure his children into running Dallas as the family business.
"When I first bought in 2000, I was the tech guy in the NBA. I was the media guy,” Cuban said. "I had every edge and every angle. Now fast-forward 24 years later, in order to sustain growth to be able to compete with the new collective bargaining agreement, you have to have other sources of revenue. And so you see other teams, in all sports for that matter, talking about casinos, talking about doing real estate development. That’s just not me. I wasn’t going to put up $2 billion to get an education on building. That's part one. Part two is my kids are now 15, 18 and 21 [years old] and over the next 10 years, that's a lot of pressure on them to have to take over the team or deal with … the trust fund issues."
The Adelsons' experience in real estate could mean a big payday for Cuban down the road, even without that majority stake in the Mavericks.
"If we’re able to build a Venetian-type casino in Dallas with an American Airlines Center in the middle of it, the valuation is $20 billion. But I own 27% of that," he said.
Those are the words of someone who sounds like he's made a rational and final decision to step away as an NBA governor for good. But 11 months later, as he revealed to Frye & Co., he won't say "never" if the right opportunity arose.
