The businessman shaped Dallas into an NBA force after years in the wilderness. But problems with the team only worsened when he sold up
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he year 2000 cracked open like a glow stick, flooding Dallas with new money – and a new Mavericks owner, who had made his money selling his streaming site just before the dot-com crash. Like the 1990s Mavs, Mark Cuban wasn’t polished – and he sure as hell wasn’t subtle. He was brash and argumentative, clashed with refs, and clapped too hard whenever Dirk Nowitzki buried a three. The internet age, in the form of Cuban, crashed courtside when he bought the team for $285m. Gone was the era of distant owners watching occasional games from the executive boxes: the fan was in control of the team now. Cuban had hacked reality.
Cuban’s thesis was simple: never play by their rules. The Mavs were his start-up. He improved nutrition, upgraded hotels for road games, bought a team plane, filled lockers with PlayStations, and fought the NBA’s lawyers with the defiance of a rapper clapping off hundos in 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? Signing 38-year-old Dennis Rodman, of course. As a trickster, Cuban understood spectacle. Those early years were about making the Mavs culturally relevant. The team made the playoffs in their first full year under Cuban. He was what has become routine for sports owners in the new millennium: a tech billionaire.
