As a decision on where the Dallas Mavericks will build their next home arena looms, Mavs CEO Rick Welts addressed the North Dallas Chamber on their top choices: a Downtown site widely reported to be where Dallas City Hall currently sits and the site of the former Valley View Mall.
Welts addressed that issue and more at the North Dallas Chamber of Commerce’s 72nd Annual Meeting April 9.
The Dallas Mavericks’ lease at its home since 2001, the American Airlines Center in Downtown Dallas, which it shares with the Stars, ends in 2031. Much has been made over the last year about where the NBA team will build its new arena— on the land where Dallas City Hall currently sits at 1500 Marilla Street or the site of the former Valley View Mall near the corner of LBJ Freeway and Preston Road in North Dallas.
One thing is for sure, though. Welts said the team is committed to staying in Dallas.
“We have made that commitment that we will remain in Dallas,” Welts said, to applause from the audience.
He said discussion is ongoing about where the Mavs’ new arena will go. Wherever they end up, Welts said the plan is for the site to include restaurants, retail, and hotels with an arena as the centerpiece.
Welts has said the organization plans to announce a site decision by July.
Scott Beck, whose Beck Ventures owns a majority of the former Valley View Mall site, said they’ve spoken with the team and he’d support the team moving there.
The last of the mall was demolished in 2023 following a series of fires. Late last year, plans were announced that developers say will transform four acres of the long-vacant property into Premier at Dallas Midtown, a development bringing together five stories of luxury apartments above 13,500 square feet of ground-floor retail.
“I think that over the past decade, working on the site itself in terms of what it would look like, how it could function — it’s set up to do this type of a thing at Valley View,” Beck said. “I’m cautiously optimistic, I live in the North Dallas area, that we could have them there. Certainly we want to have them in Dallas, like he said. If they’re thinking of going North, we would like for them to stay in the city of Dallas and go to Valley View as opposed to leaving our city.”
He noted that the decision is not up to him, though.
“There’s a big conversation happening between the Mavericks and the city in terms of what’s the appropriate location for the city and the Mavericks to agree on and so it’s really not up to us,” Beck said.
Welts also talked at the chamber’s annual meeting about his introduction to Dallas upon becoming the new CEO of the NBA team in January 2025, taking over from Cynt Marshall Before taking over from Marshall, Welts had served as as President and COO of the Golden State Warriors, President of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns and WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury, and the NBA’s Senior Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer and President of NBA Properties.
“My job number one was to come in here and keep the legacy of what Cynt Marshall did to bring to bring this team back to respectability through community engagement, civic engagement,” Welts said.
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