Some Thoughts on How Downtown Dallas Sealed Its Own Fate with the Mavericks and Stars Now Both Poised to Leave
It didn't have to be this way, except of course it did
As Brad Townsend of the Dallas Morning News reported yesterday, The owners of the Dallas Mavericks just announced their intention to spend over $50 million to purchase land at the old Valley View Mall site, which you’ve surely heard about.
That site is technically in Dallas, a definition not exactly impeded by a recently redistricted map. But while Dallas politicians will surely claim that technicality as a win, the real losers are, as usual, the fans—as they have been ever since Mark Cuban sold the team.
Something worth keeping in mind is that the Mavericks still appear to be looking to squeeze everything they possibly can out of the move. See if you notice some of the careful language choices in a statement the Mavericks released yesterday:
After seriously studying and considering several options, while working closely with the City of Dallas to identify possible locations for a new Dallas Mavericks arena and entertainment district, the Mavericks organization has entered into option agreements for the potential purchase of approximately 104 acres at the former Valley View Mall site.
We have appreciated the enthusiasm from the Dallas City Manager, elected officials and the broader community to keep the team in Dallas. We look forward to continuing the collaboration toward that goal.
The Valley View site meets most of the criteria established at the outset of our evaluation process. It is our goal to stay in the City of Dallas, and we believe this site provides the strongest opportunity to achieve that goal.
We have the opportunity to create a vibrant mixed-use destination anchored by a state-of-the-art arena, along with restaurants, entertainment options, public green spaces and family-friendly experiences. Done thoughtfully and with community engagement, a project of this scale will serve as a meaningful economic catalyst for Dallas and its residents.
We believe in Dallas, and our priority has been clear from the beginning: keeping the Dallas Mavericks in Dallas.
The phrases “considering several options,” “option agreements,” and “meets most of the criteria” all jump out at me. Because while the Mavericks will be making monthly payments in the lead-up to the eventual closing date just under two years from now, they are clearly still keeping their options open.
Remember that the same Adelson family dropped $22 million to purchase 100 acres in Irving near the old Texas Stadium, as D Magazine reported at the time. And as the Morning News reported yesterday, that land is very much still something the Adelson family could use as leverage in their talks with the City over the coming months. With the threat of an Irving site that is actually closer to downtown Dallas than the Valley View site, the Adelson family will have no shortage of ways to incentivize Dallas politicians to bend over backwards to make the Dallas site as appealing as possible to a family with more money than almost anyone else on earth.
Because with the hyper-rich, the Rockefeller quote always holds true. The Adelson family will only ever have enough when they get just that little bit more. And there’s always a little bit more to be gotten, if you’re willing to do what it takes.
That approach appears to have led to the acrimony between the Mavericks and Stars over the last year or two, where a previously stable relationship turned into lawsuits and millions in frozen revenue dollars seemingly overnight.
The Mavericks’ new owners came into town from Las Vegas looking to build a casino empire in a state that could have been fertile ground for the industry their fortune was built upon. Instead, they found Texas’s dysfunctional political landscape resistant to even the millions upon millions of dollars they quietly shelled out to lobbyists and campaign funds, and they have now said as recently as last week that no gambling component is currently planned for the new Mavericks site.
From everything I’ve been able to gather from my own research and the reporting from other local outlets, I think we have a pretty clear picture of what really went wrong between the two Dallas AAC tenants. Let’s start with what the Mavericks themselves claim to have happened, per the Morning News:
Mavericks and city officials believed the Stars had agreed to remain in AAC through 2061, with the Mavericks building their own arena in time for the 2031-32 season. But in an October 2025 interview with The News, Stars CEO Brad Alberts strongly denied a deal had been reached.
That dispute reportedly took place back in October of 2024, and the Mavericks wasted no time in punishing the Stars for not meekly following along with their plans, sending a letter with $110 in cash to Tom Gaglardi, summarily announcing their intention to grab 100% of Center Operating Company (COC) in what the Stars have described as a hostile takeover. Per the Stars, tens of millions in AAC revenue has been held in escrow since that decision, which is no small amount of money for a hockey team. Per the News, revenue from COC accounts for 15% of the Stars’ annual cash flow. The Mavericks surely knew this, and they chose to hit the Stars where it hurt the most.
To be clear, the Mavericks don’t appear to be actually claiming any damages from the Stars’ backing out of a deal about AAC lease extensions. If the Stars had agreed to stay in American Airlines Center through 2061 in any meaningful business terms, the Mavericks would surely have brought action against them for reneging on this agreement. Again, the basketball team did not do that, which suggests that any such “agreement” they claim to have had in place was about as real as Nico Harrison’s championship vision.
This rundown from the DMN is about as good a summary as you’ll find. City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert claimed that the city and the Stars had “finalized terms” on a proposed deal for the hockey team to stay in AAC for another 36 years—despite never speaking with or hearing from Gaglardi himself. How believable that claim is, I’ll let you decide.
If you find that claim of the Stars’ alleged agreement on terms that would have kept them in AAC until 2061 difficult to believe, you’re not alone. Stars President and CEO Brad Alberts told the News at the time that Bizor Tolbert was mischaracterizing any such agreement, and that the early October 2024 meeting where Alberts was shown a terms sheet dictating that the Stars stay in AAC until 2061 was the first time he had seen any such terms.
In fact, neither the team or the city are claiming any breach of contract by the Stars themselves. Instead, the Mavericks’ lawyers appear to have taken a completely different tack, apparently combing every document they could find until they got what they were looking for: leverage. Specifically, they found a clause from the original 1998 franchise agreement that required both teams to keep their “principal corporate and executive offices” within the Dallas city limits, which the Stars have never done—not under Tom Hicks, not during bankruptcy, and not under Tom Gaglardi.
By all accounts, that clause wasn’t something the Stars were even aware of until it was brought up in 2024, when they reportedly promised to amend that oversight and move their headquarters accordingly, which the team alluded to having done with a Twitter post last November.
Dallas has gone along with the Mavericks’ actions, presumably in hopes of keeping the basketball team happy and, more importantly, within the city limits. So whatever was or wasn’t agreed to before Alberts balked at that 2061 lease extension in early October 2024, it seems clear that the city was operating more off hopeful conversations than any meaningfully binding agreement.
The agreement Alberts said the Stars had discussed in August of 2024 was very different: a five-year extension of the current lease, which would keep both the Stars and Mavericks in AAC through just 2036, with proposed AAC renovations happening as well.
But from everything that’s happened since, it sure seems like the Mavericks were always looking to find a way to lock the Stars into the AAC while they got a newer, bigger venue of their own elsewhere. Having their own space, after all, would give the Mavericks prime concert and event revenue on days without basketball games, and the older AAC would probably find it tough to compete for some of those events. Thus, I can see why the Stars would have ideally wanted to have their and the Mavericks’ leases tied together.
In fact, one wonders if the Mavericks always had that 1998 franchise agreement breach card up their sleeve, and whether they would have played it even if the Stars had agreed to stay in an AAC where a hockey team that relies on gameday revenue gets relatively little from the surrounding area.
Regardless, summary judgments hearings ahead of the scheduled trial have all but won the biggest parts of the case for the Mavericks, pending the Stars’ ongoing appeals. Texas Business Court Judge Bill Whitehill ruled in April of this year that the Mavericks did have a right to claim the Stars’ 50% interest in COC as a result of the Stars’ failure to have a franchise headquarters in Dallas, regardless of the nearly three decades that had elapsed since the agreement and the Mavericks’ claim.
Unless the Stars’ appeals of those decisions radically change things—which is possible, but far from certain—it looks like the Mavericks will indeed be able to squeeze just that little bit more out of their downtown partner alongside their negotiations with the city itself. None of this appears to actually benefit Dallas in any way that I can see, but that’s never really seemed to be the goal for the new owners of the Mavericks. It’s about getting everything they can, however they have to go about doing it. You don’t fuel a global casino empire with altruism or civic loyalty, it turns out.
The Stars, for their part, aren’t exactly looking to do charity work either. With the NHL salary cap skyrocketing, I’m sure they have to look down the road to ensure their own health and growth, particularly with the collapse of the RSN model forcing teams to try alternate means of broadcasting games, as the Stars have done with Victory+. But NHL viewership lags far behind that of sports like the NFL and NBA, and the days of getting $25 million a season from FOX or Bally or whomever are long gone.
Thus, Alberts has been clear about what the Stars need to do in the future to keep that revenue where they want it to be. They want to play in an arena with fewer suites and more “premium seating,” surrounded by businesses they profit from that bring in revenue all year long, whether those be shops, restaurants, bars, hotels, or all of the above. Playing at Willow Bend in Plano, for example, could do this. The Mavericks are clearly planning to do the same thing, whether at the Valley View site or elsewhere.
More and more, you wonder if both teams came to the conclusion that every year either team stayed in the AAC beyond the current lease’s expiration in 2031 was one fewer year in which they could be drawing all that ancillary revenue from a bigger plot of land in a different location. Money not made is money lost, from a certain perspective.
How the Mavericks (with the city’s blessing) have gone about their dealings with the Stars don’t exactly appear to be good-faith negotiating, from all the reporting that’s out there. But then, the Adelsons have never had any incentive to negotiate in good faith. As ever, it’s about power and profit, and they found a way to extract both while the city of Dallas followed their lead. And now, that same city finds itself desperately clawing to keep the Mavericks within spitting distance of I-635, with hopes of either team staying downtown having all but vanished at this point.
Mayor Johnson apparently sat down with both owners: Gaglardi and Patrick Dumont (Miriam Adelson’s son-in-law) on April 11, 2025 in an attempt to clarify what the Stars were looking for in order to stay, with both owners speaking again the following month. Nothing definite appeared to come from those conversations, but in the following September, the Stars’ first and biggest ask was one the city has persistently refused to help with: resolving the Mavericks’ dispute about that pesky 1998 headquarters breach in the franchise agreement. Dallas’s city manager (Tolbert) responded that the city unfortunately was staying out of the dispute between the teams, so the Stars were on their own.
Other things Alberts told Tolbert that they would need as of September of 2025 (all per the News, again) sound like requests they didn’t really expect to get by that point: the waiving of the Stars’ annual AAC lease payments and $400-500 million in AAC renovations paid for by the city. Needless to say, neither of those sounds like it’s on the cusp of happening.
It’s interesting to look back at what Tom Gaglardi told reporters earlier that year, in the same April of 2025 when he and Dumont sat down with Johnson. I and a few other local reporters spoke to him about this very issue, with all of us as yet unaware of the things transpiring behind the scenes. Here’s what Gaglardi said about the Stars’ prospects for leaving downtown, with the Mavericks’ having recently announced their own intentions to explore other options.
Gaglardi made two things clear: first, that the Mavericks are the ones actively exploring leaving downtown after that date, not the Stars. And second, that nobody really knows what’s going to happen then.
“My heart would say we should stay in the city, and downtown. It’s a beautiful arena.” Gaglardi said, “You know, it’s gonna have to be reimagined for another 30 years [after 2031], but there’s been work done to that effect, some really cool concepts and plans, and I believe the AAC has a bright future.”
Gaglardi is positive but noncommittal. He’s also a realist, and someone who has bought and developed a lot of land downtown in Dallas. But when asked whether his investment in downtown would commit him to staying in the AAC past 2031, he demurs a bit. The investments are solid ideas on their own, but they don’t dictate where the Stars will play.
“I’ve always thought we would be playing there [the AAC] post-2031,” he says, “and now we know the Mavericks are going to do something different, and so we’ll deal with what that new reality might look like.”
Gaglardi speaks of his fellow owner Patrick Dumont in collegial terms. He talks about how several months ago, Dumont had met with him to talk about both teams potentially going to a new building together. But more recently, that’s changed. The Mavericks’ owner has a vision for the basketball in basketball-only arena, while the Stars are doing their own research.
One thing that is helpful, however, is that the Mavericks have made their plans clear far in advance.
“We didn’t create the topic. The topic’s been created by the Mavericks, and that’s fine. I appreciate that,” Gaglardi says, “versus coming out in 2029 and saying, ‘We’re going to do this.’ To have six years of runway to know where they’re going to be gives us lots of chances, lots of time to figure out what we’re going to do.”
An Afternoon with Tom Gaglardi and the Dallas Stars Media
April 22, 2025
Looking back on these quotes now, Gaglardi did a good job of being diplomatic despite the Stars’ having six months of COC revenue held in escrow thanks to the Mavericks’ actions the previous October that began with that brazen letter containing $110 in cash.
As for downtown, it sure seems like a foregone conclusion that the Stars and Mavericks will, in 2031, leave a gaping hole in Victory Park that city leadership will have to rely on its collective wisdom to fill. While Dallas basketball and hockey fans sit on tollways or the notorious I-635 en route to pricey parking lots in new locales, the city will be left wondering what exactly it really gained for what it lost.
I suppose the Mavericks will tell them the answer, even if it winds up costing them a little bit more.