“We hoped the talent would get us a championship before the number of bad contracts we took on in trades caught up with us. It didn’t happen.”

With that stunning admission on his blog this week, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban fessed up to something that had been obvious for a while: The feverish series of moves the Mavericks made in the past few years have done more harm than good. Ultimately, they cost the Mavericks one of their better players this week, as the team released Michael Finley under the luxury-tax amnesty rule to claim more than $50 million in savings (Cuban said the savings could reach as high as $90 million), and now Finley may suit up for one of Dallas’s Western Conference rivals this coming season.

Dallas’s situation has little to do with Finley, however, and a lot to do with the way the NBA operated when Cuban took over the Mavericks five years ago. Back then, the standard operating model for a successful franchise wasn’t the crafty Spurs/Pistons model, it was the Blazers/Knicks model. That spend-happy system was workable because, as Cuban put it, “When I first got to the Mavs, there was no luxury tax, revenues from TV and the league went up every year, as did the salary cap.”

So Dallas continued to follow the model, as did the Knicks, Blazers, and to a lesser extent the Kings. But once the previous collective bargaining agreement was passed five years ago, the landscape changed. Thanks to a lockout, a recession, and Michael Jordan’s retirement, the salary cap stopped rising every year. As a result, teams increasingly found themselves hemmed in by long-term contracts they thought would be eroded by the league’s history of salary-cap inflation.

The consequences hit those four teams especially hard because they were the ones who were most adamant about eschewing the luxury tax and gunning for a championship. The Knicks signed Allan Houston to a six year, $100 million deal that led to a series of increasingly desperate attempts to add faded but costly stars. Portland was nearly as overzealous as New York and only now is beginning to dig out from the mess. The Kings grossly overpaid Mike Bibby even though they were essentially bidding against themselves, which eventually cost them players like Jim Jackson.

But perhaps nowhere has the impact hit harder than in Dallas because, as Cuban says, “I wanted to believe that the next deal was the one that was the difference maker.” I’ve lost track of how many difference-makers there were. First the Mavs traded for Juwan Howard’s bad contract thinking he’d be the difference-maker. Then they dealt Howard for Raef LaFrentz and Nick Van Exel – maybe those guys would make the difference. Well, Antoine Walker had an even worse contract than LaFrentz, so the Mavs consummated that swap, and then Van Exel went to Golden State for another bad contract belonging to Antawn Jamsion. As it turns out, none of them were the difference maker, which explains why they were available in trades in the first place.

Knicks fans should find this pattern frustratingly familiar – with each deal, Dallas took on a bigger contract with more years remaining than the one they had unloaded. Starting with Howard, they somehow ended up with Walker and Jamison, not to mention the assorted Calvin Booths and Tariq Abdul-Wahads they picked up along the way.

As an indirect result, Dallas has lost two of its three core players. Finley was a luxury-tax amnesty casualty this week, but a year ago, it was Steve Nash. Looking at his already swollen payroll, Cuban decided that he couldn’t afford to pay Nash $66 million over six years and got badly burned when the Suns met that price. Nash, of course, went on to win the MVP award and help the Suns to the league’s best record.

The Mavs only made things worse for themselves by panicking in the wake of losing Nash. A sign-and-trade deal with Golden State brought in Erick Dampier for $73 million over seven years. Astute observers will note that amount is more than the Mavs were willing to pay Nash. Again, the Mavs succumbed to the idea that they were one player away and badly overpaid to acquire Dampier.

Here’s the most amazing part about all this deal-making by the Mavs – through it all, they’re still a championship contender. This is partly due to Dallas stopping the wheel on the bad-contract roulette by trading Walker and Jamison before last season. The Mavs converted those two into guards Jason Terry, Devin Harris, and Jerry Stackhouse, enlivening the backcourt and enabling Dallas to withstand the loss of Finley.

And believe it or not, by unloading Finley, the Mavs already are pointed back toward fiscal responsibility. Once Keith Van Horn’s contract comes off the books at the end of next season, Cuban’s team will be in the unfamiliar position of being under the luxury tax threshold – even if he uses his full midlevel exception next summer.

One hopes the Knicks can learn a lesson from Dallas. With some help from the tax amnesty rule, the Mavs were able to stay competitive while lightening an onerous salary situation. Likewise, New York could greatly improve its payroll situation. If Houston retires and Isiah Thomas can resist the urge to trade Penny Hardaway or Tim Thomas for an even worse contract, New York will sidestep the luxury tax in 2006-07. Portland already is under the tax after dropping Derek Anderson, while Sacramento is within striking distance, too.

Thus, Cuban’s missive may represent more than mere griping over the loss of Finley. It marks, in many respects, the end of basketball’s free-spending era. The few owners who thought they could spend their way to victory and blithely pay the luxury tax have seen that the system is rigged against them. The Mavs and Kings were fortunate to be able to change course while staying in contention; the Blazers and Knicks weren’t as lucky. Regardless, the era of teams with payrolls that are twice the league salary cap now seems headed the way of the dinosaurs.

Mr. Hollinger is the author of the “2005–06 Pro Basketball Forecast.”