How Mark Cuban turned the Dallas Mavericks franchise around by treating it like a startup
It took Cuban until 2013 to make the Mavericks profitable, but since he took over, the Mavs have made the playoffs all but one year since 2001 and have sold out every game since December 15, 2001, for the longest sellout streak in American professional sports, according to Forbes. They won their first NBA championship in 2011.
How did Cuban turn the franchise around? He approached the team like a startup rather than a legacy brand, Kirk Goldsberry argues in a new article for Grantland.
We've highlighted some of the key ways the billionaire "Shark Tank" investor turned the Dallas Mavericks from a joke into a championship contender, using the same principles he used in his business career.
He focused on the customer.
"The hardcore fan is not who fills our arena, not even close," Cuban tells Grantland. "The people that listen to sports talk radio aren't the people paying our bills. It's the signal versus the noise. They're the noise, they're not the signal."
Cuban says that it was heresy at the time to say they were selling an experience rather than basketball.
The way he saw it, if he could sell a fun experience for less than a night out at a restaurant or a movie, he could fill the upper levels of the arena. And if he could establish the venue as a place to be seen, he could sell costly courtside seats to Dallas' celebrities and socialites.
Eighteen months after buying the team, the Mavs moved to the new American Airlines Center. Cuban invested in a massive, state-of-the-art JumboTron that played videos emphasizing crowd interactions. He had the rims mic'ed up to get even casual fans excited about the games progression.
He treated his players better.
Cuban tells Grantland that the first time he met with the team, it was at the Holiday Inn they were staying at. Former Mavericks player Gary Trent told Cuban, "Mark, we get into Oakland, California, four in the morning, at the back end of a back-to-back, and we don't have room service in the hotel. How do you think we get food? What do you think we do?"
Cuban immediately made sure that the team started staying at nicer hotels and quickly bought a better team plane.
He helped build teams that clicked.
Grantland's Goldsberry credits Cuban with retaining coach Don Nelson - now remembered as one of the top 10 coaches in NBA history - and fostering a culture of success with young players Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash at the helm.
"It's hard to change the culture of an entire pro sports organization, but that's exactly what the quartet of Cuban, Nash, Nowitzki, and Nelson did," Goldsberry writes.
He recognized the value of analytics.
The Mavericks were one of the first teams to use concepts from "Moneyball" in the NBA, crunching numbers to determine on-court success, and Goldsberry largely credits their 2011 championship run to the emphasis on analytics spearheaded by Cuban.
The Mavs' front office hired stats guy Roland Beech in 2005, and as his influence grew, the team was able to make decisions about individuals' playing time that may have initially seemed strange, but were backed by Beech's analytics and turned out to be smart choices.