Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

NBA

Why the Knicks should fire Woodson right now

Of course you should blame the players. They are the ones whose collective basketball IQ barely equals the high temperature in Central Park this week. They are the ones, most of them, who little resemble the numbers on their basketball-reference.com pages. They are the ones barely breaking a sweat now.

They are the ones who have stopped listening.

But in almost any other fiasco of a season — and make no mistake, “fiasco” is a euphemism when it’s used to describe the 2013-14 Knicks — the players on a team as infuriating to watch as the Knicks would have already been granted cover, because almost any other team would have already changed coaches.

The fact the Knicks haven’t done that yet, and that Mike Woodson is still on the job, is mystifying unless James Dolan has decided the only recourse to make people pay for this egregious basketball season is to endure the shame that will bury this team across its final 21 games, players and coach alike.

There is a problem with even that way of thinking, though:

It assumes this is a team capable of actually feeling shame.

And what we’ve seen from the Knicks since the All-Star Game is a team whose heart has clearly been irretrievably squashed, whose spirit lies in tatters, and there’s no telling just what manner of basketball felonies lie before them with a West Coast trip yet to come and a growing sense that no part of this can be turned around at all.

And it’s not only the players being punished here. It’s Woodson, too. Look, nobody likes to see anyone lose his job. And after pushing every proper lever last season, it is absolutely unfortunate that things have reversed so completely this year.

But they have reversed. And if you can’t lay it all at Woodson’s dress shoes, you can lay a lot of it there: his stubborn defensive schemes, his bland offense, and the very clear fact his players no longer give maximum effort. They acknowledge as much. They seem to feel bad about it.

And then lay down dead the next game anyway all over again.

In November, Dolan seemed to paint himself into a very distinct corner when, talking about how much latitude he would give Woodson, he said, “I’ll bet you I’m more patient than Mikhail [Prokhorov] is of his team,” and it has seemed he has been most reluctant to be perceived otherwise.

But Dolan also said this the same day: “One thing I can say about Mike is he has the respect of all the players. … He treats them fairly and relatively equally, and that’s part of where the respect emanates from. And those are hard things to get from a coach. When a coach loses a team … that’s when a coach is kind of done.”

Yes. Kind of.

Again: It’s a permanent mark against this core of players, especially since Woodson got the job in the first place because they stopped listening to Mike D’Antoni, too. But the old cliché is true: You can’t fire 12 players. You can fire one coach. And it’s become unfathomable Dolan hasn’t fired his coach yet unless — and this would seem even more unthinkable — he hasn’t ruled out bringing him back next year.

The sad truth is, this isn’t an isolated incident. As Woodson has had fine moments with the Knicks, he also did solid work in Atlanta, where the Hawks’ win totals always increased: 13 to 26, 30 to 37, 47 to 53. Yet by the end, they also tuned him out.

From Jamal Crawford, after the Hawks lost to the Magic by 30 at home in Woodson’s penultimate game: “It was like an NCAA Tournament game — they were the No. 1 seed and we were the 16. Except they’re the 2 and we’re the 3.”

From Al Horford: “Some guys have mentally checked out.”

From Hawks owner Michael Gearon Jr.: “I thought we kind of looked like deer in headlights.”

Dismissals aren’t easy, and if Dolan has been slow in the past to dismiss some — notably Isiah Thomas and Glen Sather — he has little issue actually using his hammer. He did dismiss Glen Grunwald, a move whose reasoning would have been easy to defend — Grunwald did, after all, assemble this atrocious roster — but whose timing, on the eve of training camp, remains difficult to comprehend.

Not as much, though, as continuing to let Woodson be humiliated, night after night, by players who might as well be playing with iPod buds plugged into their ears. Blame the players for that, sure. They deserve it. The coach?

Honestly. Enough is enough.