The Dallas Mavericks don’t have a lot of time left — and their CEO isn’t pretending otherwise. With the clock ticking toward a hard deadline, the franchise is racing to lock down a new home before its current lease runs out and its options narrow to nothing.
The Mavericks’ lease at American Airlines Center expires in 2031, and CEO Rick Welts has made it clear the team needs to move fast. The organization is searching for roughly 50 acres of land somewhere in or around Dallas to build not just an arena, but an entire entertainment district — think corporate headquarters, a practice facility, a medical center, a 4,000-to-5,000-seat performance venue, and a four- or five-star hotel. That’s an ambitious footprint, and finding that kind of contiguous space in a dense urban environment is, to put it mildly, complicated.
City Hall Enters the Picture
One location that’s already come up in serious conversation: the current Dallas City Hall site. And the opening, according to Welts, didn’t come from the team — it came from the city itself. “Listen over a year ago, City Manager Tolbert came to us and said, ‘Look, I gotta move out of City Hall, I can’t afford to operate what we do in that building, going forward for the taxpayers,'” Welts recounted. That’s a striking admission — a city essentially flagging its own landmark as a potential teardown candidate because it’s too expensive to keep the lights on.
City Manager Kimberly Tolbert reportedly initiated those talks with the Mavericks more than a year ago, well before any public announcement. Whether that site ultimately makes the cut remains to be seen, but the fact that it’s on the table at all signals how seriously both sides are taking the conversation.
‘On the Clock’ — and Feeling It
Welts hasn’t been shy about the urgency. The Mavericks are “on the clock,” he said, and while downtown Dallas remains a “viable option,” time is “not on our side.” That’s a careful way of saying: the window is closing, and a 50-acre parcel doesn’t exactly materialize overnight in the middle of a major American city.
Still, Welts has been emphatic that leaving Dallas entirely isn’t the plan. Not even close. “We want to be the team that has Dallas on the uniform that actually plays in Dallas,” he told reporters — a line that sounds simple enough until you consider it’s also a pointed reminder that relocations happen, that franchises drift, and that this team is trying hard not to become a cautionary tale.
What They’re Actually Building
The scope here is worth sitting with for a moment. This isn’t just a new basketball arena. The Mavericks are envisioning something closer to a destination — a mixed-use campus that would anchor a neighborhood and generate economic activity well beyond game nights. Live Nation has reportedly expressed interest in operating the mid-sized performance venue, which would give the development a serious entertainment anchor beyond the NBA calendar. A luxury hotel on-site would round out the kind of year-round draw that cities increasingly demand before committing public support to these projects.
That’s the catch, though. Assembling 50 contiguous acres — especially downtown — means navigating land ownership, demolition, environmental review, community opposition, and years of permitting. None of that moves quickly, which is exactly why Welts keeps using the word “clock.”
A Decision Expected This Summer
So when do we get an answer? The team is targeting July to publicly reveal the chosen site. That’s just a few months away, and it would represent the first concrete step in what figures to be a years-long development saga. Multiple locations are presumably still in the running — the City Hall site among them — but the search is, by all indications, approaching its final stretch.
Five years sounds like a long runway. But in the world of arena development — where financing deals collapse, community votes stall projects, and construction timelines rarely cooperate — 2031 is closer than it looks. The Mavericks know it. And now, so does everyone else.
