Rick Welts will retire as Mavericks CEO and hand the Valley View arena to Ethan Casson, a day after calling the Luka trade his hardest moment in Dallas

Rick Welts will retire as chief executive of the Dallas Mavericks at the end of 2026, the team announced Wednesday. Team president Ethan Casson will take over as CEO and alternate governor on Jan. 1, 2027. Welts, 73, is a Hall of Famer who is in his 49th NBA season. The Mavericks brought him out of retirement in December 2024 mainly to deliver a new arena. That project, a plan to leave downtown for the former Valley View Mall site in North Dallas, is still waiting on zoning approval. It will now be finished by his successor.

The timing stood out. On Tuesday, the day before the announcement, Welts spent about 20 minutes on stage at an investment conference in Dallas talking about the arena, the Luka Dončić trade and his future. Asked what was next for him, he said a book “might be in the future,” then added: “I’m kind of enjoying what I’m doing right now.”

Welts will stay on as CEO through Dec. 31 and work with Casson on the handover. Casson joined Dallas in August 2025 in a newly created president’s role and has run the team’s day-to-day business since then. He was widely seen as the planned successor.

Today, we announced that CEO Rick Welts will retire at the end of 2026, with President Ethan Casson succeeding him effective January 1, 2027.

Full announcement: https://t.co/jFoMIOkWKX pic.twitter.com/NVdE9s8dPL

— Dallas Mavericks (@dallasmavs) October 28, 2026

What Dumont, Welts and Casson said

“Rick joined the Mavericks at an important moment for our organization, and his leadership, judgment and experience have been invaluable,” governor Patrick Dumont said in the team’s statement. “Just as importantly, Rick and Ethan have built a strong partnership that has created a natural and seamless path forward.” Dumont added that watching the two work together “has only reinforced our confidence that Ethan is the right person to lead the Mavericks into this next chapter.”

“When I came to Dallas, I saw an extraordinary opportunity to help build something meaningful for the future of this franchise, and I am incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made,” Welts said. “I have complete confidence in him and could not feel better about the future of the Dallas Mavericks.”

Casson called Welts’ impact on the team, the industry and on him personally “difficult to overstate.” “We’ve spent the last 15 months working closely together to build a foundation for the future,” he said. “Our vision extends well beyond the basketball court. From developing a world-class arena and entertainment district to deepening our relationships with fans, partners, and the community, we have an opportunity to create something that truly reflects the ambition, energy, and spirit of Dallas.”

Where the arena stands

On June 1, the Mavericks signed option agreements for about 104 acres at Valley View, roughly 10 miles north of downtown. They picked it over a downtown site that included the current City Hall. The team has played downtown since its first season in 1980-81 and has shared American Airlines Center with the NHL’s Stars since 2001. Its lease there runs through the 2030-31 season, and the target is to open the new building for 2031-32. The Mavericks have since filed a rezoning request covering about 112 acres and hired Legends Global as project manager. They have said they will not buy the land until the zoning is approved.

On Tuesday, Welts said he had spent three hours that day in an arena design meeting with Dumont, who he said is “intimately involved in every aspect of the design.” He described a project much bigger than the one he led in San Francisco, where Chase Center came with about 10 acres of other development. “We don’t want to build Chase Center in San Francisco. We don’t want to build Intuit Dome in Los Angeles,” he said. “We want to build something that when people walk in, they’ll feel like we really understand this market and the special nature of North Texas.”

He also made clear how far there is to go. “We’re at the beginning of the beginning,” Welts said, noting that it took seven years to get Chase Center built and move the Warriors from Oakland. On public money, he said talks with the city are ongoing and that he is “in the camp” that some public investment is justified: “I think it’s money well spent.” He also said Dumont, who runs Las Vegas Sands, has committed that the Mavericks project will have no casino element, “period.” Sands already owns land in Irving that Welts said would probably be the site if casino gambling ever came to North Texas. Dumont’s wider plans for Sands and sports were covered in our look at the Macao preseason games.

‘Trading Luka’

Asked about the hardest part of his time in Dallas, Welts did not hesitate: “Trading Luka.” He arrived about a month before the February 2025 deal that sent Dončić to the Lakers. “This is a fan base who loved this player,” he said, “and I think at some levels I think the honesty would be there was probably an underestimation of just how valuable he was.”

He called the period “a hundred days of not fun at the Mavericks office.” That ran from the trade to the May 2025 draft lottery, when Dallas jumped to No. 1 with long odds and drafted Cooper Flagg. “We’ve had to rebuild trust back into the Mavericks fan base,” Welts said, calling Flagg a “generational player” and the team’s “stroke of luck.”

He also pointed to a change on the media side. Seventy Mavericks games are on free over-the-air television, and the team also sells its own streaming subscription. Welts said the NBA is discussing a national-local streaming plan that could come “maybe as soon as next year.”

Who Welts and Casson are

Welts started as a Seattle SuperSonics ball boy in 1969 and later worked in the NBA league office, where he helped create All-Star Weekend. He went on to run the Phoenix Suns’ business side. In 2011, as Suns president, he became one of the first top executives in men’s professional sports to come out publicly as gay. He then spent 10 years with the Warriors and led the Chase Center project before stepping back in 2021. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2018.

He said Tuesday that Commissioner Adam Silver first suggested he talk to Dumont, who was looking to replace retiring CEO Cynthia Marshall. After two Zoom calls, Dumont flew in person to pick him up in Palm Springs for a day of meetings in Las Vegas. Welts said his rule for sustained success is three factors: “It’s ownership, it’s ownership, and it’s ownership.”

Casson, his successor, spent nine years as CEO and alternate governor of the Timberwolves and Lynx before coming to Dallas. Before that, he was chief operating officer of the San Francisco 49ers during the building of Levi’s Stadium, where he closed a 20-year, $220 million naming-rights deal. That stadium background is a big reason he was hired to see the Valley View project through.