NBA approves sale of Mavericks to Las Vegas Sands casino company

DALLAS — The NBA on Wednesday approved the sale of the majority stake of Mark Cuban's Dallas Mavericks to the families that run the Las Vegas Sands casino company.

The deal was approved just under a month after the families of Miriam Adelson and Sivan and Patrick Dumont announced plans to buy the club. The purchase falls within a valuation range of $3.5 billion.

Patrick Dumont, president and chief operating officer of Las Vegas Sands and Adelson's son-in-law, will serve as governor of the Mavericks. Adelson is the widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

Cuban is expected to retain control of basketball operations, and there is no indication the club will leave Dallas.

Cuban said he wants to partner with Las Vegas Sands on a long-term project to build an arena in downtown Dallas that would include a hotel and casino.

Gambling is not legal in Texas, and efforts to legalize it face great difficulties. However, Miriam Adelson has not hidden her desire to introduce casino games to the Lone Star State.

She pumped more than $2 million last year into a political action committee, called Texas Sands, that made generous donations to state lawmakers and flooded the GOP-controlled state Capitol with lobbyists . She separately gave another $1 million to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

But the spending blitz has failed to achieve a breakthrough this year in the Texas Legislature, where resistance to casino legalization runs deep.

Texas already has a billionaire NBA owner who is also a casino operator, Houston Rockets Governor Tilman Fertitta. Fertitta also favors bringing casinos to his home state, but has seen lawmakers reject the idea year after year.

News of the Mavs' sale broke last month, hours after Las Vegas Sands announced that Adelson was selling $2 billion of his stock to buy an unspecified professional sports team.