Question of the Day - 27 February 2025

In other words, Miriam Adelson and her son-in-law Patrick Dumont doth protest too much, we thinks? 

They're certainly repudiating the rumors that the Dallas Mavericks NBA team, which they own, is moving to Las Vegas, but we don't believe they're denying it so vociferously, as suggested by Queen Gertrude in Hamlet, that it makes them seem insincere or that they're hiding a deeper truth, as your question intimates. 

We don't know exactly where this particular rumor originated, but right after the team traded 25-year-old five-time All-NBA first-team Slovenian superstar Luka Dončić, social media blew up, claiming that Dumont traded Dončić in order to anger fans enough that he had "good reason" to move the Mavs to Vegas. That, to us, is a bit of a Machiavellian stretch. 

Furthemore, we're thinking that the NBA doesn't want that to happen either. Las Vegas has been long mooted as one of the next markets for a basketball expansion team and the buy in, currently, is around $4.5 billion, based on the price of recent NBA team sales and the value of the league's most valuable franchises. That could go even higher in a bidding war. The league's expansion fee would be evenly split among the current NBA owners, who almost certainly don't want to pass up easy money for a team relocation. 

In addition, the Adelsons have been trying lock up Texas for brick-and-mortar casinos since long before patriarch Sheldon Adelson passed away in early 2021 and they haven't been reticent about sharing their plans for a new Dallas arena and tourist district that could include a gaming floor. For that matter, they sold out of Vegas and Las Vegas Sands is now only in Macau and Singapore. Even though Miriam Adelson and Dumont live here, we don't see them wanting to get back into big business in southern Nevada, especially gaming. 

We could be wrong, of course, and time will tell. But for these reasons and we're sure others, we don't see a future for the Las Vegas Mavericks.