Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban quickly moved on from the club's failed bid to land point guard Deron Williams. But he's holding a grudge against Jason Kidd, the championship point guard who surprisingly backed out on a deal to return and signed with the New York Knicks.

Cuban, during an appearance Tuesday morning on ESPN Dallas 103.3 FM's "Ben & Skin Show," said the Mavs actually might be better off without Williams, the homegrown talent and three-time All-Star the Mavs hotly pursued in free agency. Cuban claimed a max contract for Williams would have created tricky salary-cap ramifications and made it difficult to build a championship-caliber roster around him and Mavs stalwart Dirk Nowitzki.

"I don't want to pick on Deron Williams because he's a great, great, great player, and so it's not necessarily him, per se," Cuban said. "The conversation we had going back and forth -- and obviously the decision was to go for him -- but the conversation was, 'OK, once you add $17.1 million in salary to what we'd have with Dirk and Trix (Shawn Marion), then what do you do?' That's your squad. And it's not just your squad for this year. It's your squad for next year other than the $3.3 million mini midlevel.

"So that was a challenge that we had because we want to win, and everybody talks about Dirk's window. Well, not only would it have been difficult to add players, then it also would have been difficult to trade players, and in reality that was the same problem that Deron had. Because he looked and saw the same thing and said, 'OK, now what are you going to do?'"