Mark Cuban's sale of Dallas Mavericks could help open Texas to legal casino gambling

When word spread that billionaire Mark Cuban was selling a majority stake in the NBA's Dallas Mavericks and quitting his television gig on "Shark Tank," it spark a flurry of speculation that the 65-year-old entrepreneur would run for president next year as an independent.

That speculation cooled a bit after Cuban told NBC News he had "no plans" to trade the elbow-throwing on the basketball court for the pushing and shoving of the political arena. The wording did leave a little wiggle room for mind-changing. But then he slammed the door, telling Axios that he'd never-ever-ever run for public office.

Though he nixed a 2024 run for president, Cuban has openly flirted with the idea in the past, but not within the structure of the two-party system, which he has called "so messed up."

But despite all of that, the gambling website SportsBetting.ag put the odds of Cuban running at 80-1, down considerably from the 250-1 gap just one day before that Mavericks sale surfaced.

The site also went so far as to offer bookies some guidelines if they were planning to take wagers on whom Cuban might select as a running mate. The top bets were Republican U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah and his Democratic colleague Joe Manchin of West Virginia with 3-1 odds.

Perhaps the betting website should have looked a little closer to home when it was considering what the future might hold after all of the paperwork is filed on the sale of the Mavs, who are worth as much $3.5 billion, according to The Associated Press. The buyers are the Adelson and Dumont families of Nevada, and they happen to own the Las Vegas Sands, one of the nation's premier hotel and casino destinations.

And even before the sale was on the table, Cuban reportedly contemplated a partnership with the Sands in 2022 for a hotel and casino in Dallas. But one of the roadblocks was that casino gambling is not exactly legal in Texas.

During the regular session of the Legislature this year, the Sands employed scores of some of the Texas' best-known, and best-paid, lobbyists in what turned out to be yet another failed effort to bring gambling to Texas.

In fact, the list of lobbyists registered to represent the Sands takes up a full five pages on the Texas Ethics Commission's website.

Cuban was also part of the fight to expand the footprint of gambling in Texas beyond the state-run lottery and state-regulated horse and dog tracks. The Mavericks, along with the other professional sports franchises in Texas, backed the effort to allow sports betting.

Gov. Greg Abbott signaled early on that the matter would not necessarily have been dead on arrival if a bill had made its way through the House and Senate. He called sports betting "really just a form of entertainment." But the legislation stalled in the Senate, where its presiding officer, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, kept it bottled up.

With the owners of the Sands expanding their empire into Texas, it would appear that the odds of legalized casinos will be better in 2025 than they were in 2023 — and probably better than ever.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Did Mark Cuban give the effort to bring casinos to Texas a big lift?