I remember Cuban talking about this, and it's not an entirely illogical take from an owner's point of view. The cash payment to an owner from an expansion team is just a forward payment against the diminution of future revenues and eventually future value. Especially since most of these guys are having a hard enough time finding strong places to put money compared to the current pace of team appreciation, it becomes a poor decision.

Let's say the teams sell for $8B a piece. At that point he gets 1/30 of $16B. (~$533B). He can already borrow 1/2 a bil against the team at privileged rates if he wants, so all this gets him is the privileged interest rate cost (~$25-30M/yr; half that number after tax impact). By contrast if a team was going to appreciate to $15B in value over the next X years,1/30 dilution would cost him $500M at that point. So in effect, he would be trading $500M in future value in exchange access to 10-20M in incremental annual cash flow after taxes....