Mavericks’ CEO Rick Welts Discusses Dealing With Franchise’s Reversal Of Fortune

Dallas Mavericks’ CEO Rick Welts turned his love for basketball into a career spanning over 50 years.

He’s experienced championship success with his hometown Seattle Supersonics, then three more times with the Golden State Warriors.

Welts is credited with creating the NBA’s All-Star weekend concept in 1984 and the marketing angle for the “Dream Team” for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. They’re ideas hatched while working in the NBA’s league office, where he served as executive vice president and chief marketing officer.

He was Brandweek’s 1998 Marketer of the Year for his role alongside league president Val Ackerman in launching the WNBA.

In 2018, Welts was enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

The call that abruptly ended Welts’ retirement

Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s “The Future of Everything” event at The Glasshouse in New York City on Wednesday, Welts conveyed he was enjoying retirement when a phone call put an end to it.

On the other line was the NBA’s commissioner, Adam Silver, calling to ask him about joining the Dallas Mavericks to replace Cynt Marshall as the franchise’s CEO.

Marshall became the first Black woman to head up an NBA team. The former AT&T executive helped change the organization’s toxic culture on the heels of a scathing expose about its work environment.

After a tenure that also included initiating a television partnership enabling millions of Texans to watch the Mavericks play for free and significant upgrades to the team’s home venue, the American Airlines Center, Marshall retired.

Welts came aboard as the team’s new CEO in January, ending a retirement that only lasted three years.

One month later, the team traded Luka Doncic.

How Welts found out about the Mavericks’ franchise-altering deal

Reliving his experience when the news of the Doncic trade went public, Welts shared, “I’m wide awake in bed because about 90 minutes before that, I got a call from [the franchise’s governor] Patrick Dumont.”

“Hey, Rick, we’re going to make a trade,” Dumont informed him.

“OK, what are we doing?” asked Welts, who couldn’t imagine the response he was about to hear.

“We’re going to trade Luka to the Lakers.”

It was news that made Welts question whether he was actually speaking with Dumont.

It was a deal that discretely sent their beloved face of the franchise to a hated rival, the Los Angeles Lakers. In exchange, Dallas acquired Anthony Davis, who turned 32 in March, Max Christie, a 2029 first-round pick, and a small sum of money from the Utah Jazz.

“It was tough on everybody,” voiced Welts, who said the night of the deal was a sleepless one for him.

But whom he feels for the most are the youthful employees who comprise a significant percentage of the organization’s workforce. Many are individuals whose fandom inspired them to seek jobs with the Mavericks. They had no experience to draw on and no way to prepare for the backlash of trading Doncic.

“There was no way to prepare our office for what was about to happen,” said Welts. “There’s a personal toll that it takes.”

There were protests and funerals for a departed star held outside the American Airlines Center. Inside the building, chants to fire the team’s president of basketball operations, Nico Harrison, reached a deafening decibel.

Feeling abandoned, fans returned the favor, switching allegiances to the Lakers to remain with Doncic.

In his over 50 years of NBA experience, Welts says he’s never seen a demonstration reflecting this type of emotional attachment. While sharing his perspective, he noted teams trading their most popular player at some point in that individual’s career is a common occurrence.

The outrage resulted in a significant reduction in local ticket sales. That’s the Mavericks’ primary source of revenue. But what Welts noticed was the season ticket holders with them for at least a decade renewed their packages. However, most people who were season ticketholders for four years or fewer did not.

“It was an incredibly rough ride until a couple of Monday’s ago when it got a lot better,” expressed Welts from the stage at the Glasshouse.

The Mavericks’ remarkable reversal of fortune

When the NBA draft lottery arrived on May 12, Dallas had a 1.8 percent chance of landing the No. 1 pick. The Mavericks moved up a record-setting 10 spots. They’re poised to add former Duke Blue Devil, Cooper Flagg, a generational prospect, with the first overall selection.

“I don’t think there’s ever been quite a reversal of fortune in our league as happened that night,” said Welts.

The Mavericks’ CEO wasn’t in the room when the ping pong balls bounced their way. Instead, he opted for the television production of the lottery. As he witnessed Dallas move up the draft board, defying the odds, he told a team staffer: “If our logo doesn’t come out at No. 4, I think I’m going to have a heart attack.”

While it may have felt like an eternity, not long after that, the Mavericks had won the lottery.

Upon obtaining the No. 1 pick, many fans called to reverse course after not renewing their season tickets in the aftermath of the Doncic trade.

Dallas, who reportedly has no intention of trading a potential face of the franchise on a rookie deal, has a new star the team and fan base can potentially grow with for the next decade and beyond.

The Mavericks’ future also includes a new state-of-the-art arena and entertainment district in Dallas. The plan is for that to open in 2031. Welts was with the Warriors when they built the Chase Center in San Francisco. The venue capturing the essence of San Francisco is a goal he intends to duplicate with the Mavericks’ future home.

It’s all part of a rosier outlook that seemed impossible to envision less than a month ago.

As Welts put it, “There are two things that cure everything, and that’s time and winning.”