Bought as an N.B.A. Team, the Mavericks Are Being Sold as Much More

The sales of most professional sports teams are fairly predictable.

They happen because owners die or cannot figure out how to pass the team on to their families. They run out of money, are more focused on other pursuits or are pushed out because of misconduct.

Once the decision to sell is made, the process plays out in a relatively public way. Bankers are hired, potential purchasers register interest, an auction occurs, and weeks or months of reports in the news media follow.

So it was a complete surprise last month when, with no warning, the families that control the Las Vegas Sands casino empire announced that they had reached a binding agreement to buy a controlling interest in the National Basketball Association’s Dallas Mavericks from Mark Cuban. The only thing that made sense was that the situation involved Mr. Cuban, who has long run the Mavericks in an unconventional manner.

Still, more than two weeks later, the basic question surrounding the sale — Why did Mr. Cuban do it? — remains mostly unanswered. The reliably loquacious Mr. Cuban, who always seemed to be having more fun than any other owner, declined to speak on the record for this article. The Adelson and Dumont families, wary of getting ahead of an N.B.A. approval process that includes due diligence and a vote on the sale by other team owners, declined to comment beyond a statement expressing their excitement.

But what is clear is that the sale represents a window into the rapidly changing nature of the business of sports.

When Mr. Cuban bought the Mavericks in 2000, flush with cash from selling Broadcast.com just before the dot-come bubble popped, professional sports teams were still mainly just teams.

Now they are anchors for larger business enterprises. Anchor tenants for arenas that are the beating heart of vast entertainment complexes, as in Sacramento. Anchor content for regional sports networks or other media conglomerates, as in Washington, D.C. Anchor brands for millions of fans newly allowed to bet on sports, as in Phoenix.

Mr. Cuban is also many things — a dot-com billionaire, an owner of a company trying to reduce the price of prescription drugs and, for one more season, one of the main investors in the reality show “Shark Tank” — but what he is not is a real estate mogul, providing a possible motivation for the sale.

The Dallas Mavericks partly own the American Airlines Center, where they play their games in the Victory Park development just north of downtown. But while the owners of their co-tenant, the National Hockey League’s Dallas Stars, have invested in land near the arena, Mr. Cuban has mostly expressed annoyance that it takes away from fan parking. Now he is changing his tune.

“Cuban probably wants to imitate what has worked, have the ownership control he doesn’t have in Victory Park, and push it to a new level with casino and resort integration,” said Robert Sroka, a professor of sport administration at Georgia State University and…