I wonder if Mark Cuban is adding to the misery of witnessing his Mavs’ getting beaten by the Rockets by checking out the scores from the Heat-Nets series.

If he didn’t catch on during the regular season, by now Cuban has to know he should have traded for Shaquille O’Neal when he had the chance. If he had, we’d be talking about Dallas as the favorite to win the NBA playoffs instead of jotting down notes to have ready when it’s time to write the Mavericks’ obituary.

It’s easy to forget that Cuban probably could have had Shaq last year when Kobe Bryant decided to dismantle the Lakers and rebuild them around his wonderful self. The price reportedly would have been steep — Dirk Nowitzki, Dallas’ best player — and Cuban wasn’t willing to pay it.

The Lakers were desperate to get rid of Shaq after the big guy demanded a trade. They would have jumped at the chance to land Nowitzki.

But Nowitzki was the face of the franchise, the man the team was built around. At 26, he was six years younger than Shaq, who had been showing signs of beginning to break down. Sure, Shaq might hang together for a year or two, but he hadn’t won the title for the Lakers the previous year, and there’s that old canard in sports that holds you don’t mortgage the future for instant success. Nowitzki was the future.

Cuban was in the midst of a couple of really bad decisions. Besides not capitalizing on a chance at Shaq and allowing the league’s most dominating, intimidating player to go to Miami, the Dallas owner also failed to keep free-agent point guard Steve Nash from going to Phoenix.

You look at what Cuban might have put together — Nash and Shaq, the two leading MVP candidates, on the same team — and you can only wonder how any young, rich, egotistical owner not named Dan Snyder could be so dumb.

Cuban is young and fabulously wealthy and mercurial. He likes getting attention and making headlines, and he says he wants nothing more than to win championships. You get the feeling he’d like to be the NBA’s version of George Steinbrenner, but without the enmity and ill will.

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And he does seem to be a much nicer guy than his Bossness. Cuban even answers e-mail from the fans and sometimes takes their suggestions for improving the way the game is presented.

Nice guys don’t necessarily finish last. That’s another lie that sports writers taught you. But they do if they can’t understand that there is no tomorrow in today’s big-league sports; there’s only right now.

Cuban didn’t want to trade young talent for old talent because when you do that, your window of opportunity gets very narrow. But right now, it's looking as if this year’s window already has shut for him.

All of Nowitzki’s great skills aren’t winning playoff games, not against a team with a really big center and a swing man who’s playing way better than the German. With or without Nash, if Cuban had Shaq in the center to smack Yao Ming around, the Rockets wouldn’t be going home up 2-0. With or without Nash, we’d still be saying the Mavs are the team to beat instead of the team getting beat.

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