Nowitzki, who was admittedly disappointed and frustrated after the Mavs dropped to eight games below .500 with their eighth loss in nine games Saturday night, told ESPNDallas.com that owner Mark Cuban's post-lockout decision to let Tyson Chandler and other key members of the 2011 title team leave could be judged as "a mistake or not" after seeing whether the Mavs are able to make any major personnel moves this summer.

The plan was to acquire a legitimate superstar in his prime -- or possibly even two -- to lighten the 34-year-old Nowitzki's load in the latter stage of his surefire Hall of Fame career. But Chris Paul and Dwight Howard did not hit the free-agency market last summer as anticipated when Dallas decided to create significant salary-cap space for the first time in Cuban's 13-year ownership tenure -- they both can be free agents this summer -- and the Mavs' recruiting efforts failed to land Deron Williams.

"It's going to be tough now," Nowitzki said after the Mavs' home overtime loss to the Western Conference cellar-dwelling New Orleans Hornets. "I always liked to think you don't want to build your franchise on hope.

"We hoped for Deron last year. We hoped for Dwight. Why would he leave the Lakers? To me, it makes no sense. He's in a great situation. Why would CP3 leave? [The Los Angeles Clippers are] the best team in the league probably right now. They're probably the deepest team. So are you going to hope that we get something?

"Maybe Cuban has something up his sleeve. Maybe you have to take a chance on a bad contract to get him in here and make something happen. I mean, I don't know. That's something we'll have to see this summer. We're going to play out this season. I'm going to get better and better, hopefully from game to game, so I can actually close out some of these games. And then we'll see what happens."

Nowitzki reiterated those exact comments after Monday's shootaround in Utah and clairified any confusion about any discussions of him being traded.

"I never said I was going to be traded," Nowitzki told reporters Monday. "I said what I said numerous times: We have two options. We tried to sign (Deron Williams), but we didn't sign him, so we have two options: We either trade everybody and start over or we bring in a bunch of one-year deals -- which we did -- and try to be a player this summer."

Cuban took Nowitzki's comments in stride when contacted Monday morning.

"Dirk gets upset when we are in a tough period," Cuban replied in an email to ESPNDallas.com. "If you only knew the things he has said to me during recent seasons about our team. I'm glad I didn't listen :)

"That's Dirk. He uses being mad for personal motivation. No one on this team should be happy with the way we are playing right now. I know I'm not. But we aren't going to change our approach. We will be opportunistic and try to get this season turned around."

At 13-21, the Mavs entered Sunday 5½ games out of the West's eighth seed, and there are only two teams in the conference with worse records. It's an unfamiliar feeling for a franchise that had its streak of 11 50-win seasons end during last season's lockout-compressed campaign, when the stripped-down Mavs' title defense ended with a first-round sweep at the hands of the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Now Nowitzki, who notes that the Mavs' playoff hopes wouldn't be nearly so bleak had he not missed the first 27 games of the season after undergoing arthroscopic surgery on his right knee, is the centerpiece of a struggling team with chemistry concerns, surrounded by newcomers whose contracts expire at the end of the season.

That's the risk the Mavs took when they opted to make financial flexibility a priority in an attempt to hit a home run in free agency.

"We knew that coming in, that eight or nine new guys on one-year deals is not really an ideal situation, but what else is there to do?" Nowitzki said. "So either you break the whole thing up and trade me, or you get a bunch of one-year deals and try to be a player next summer. That's the decision we made, so now we've got to fight through it."