NBA

ACT OF SABOTAGE

ISIAH (“Let’s Get Physical”) Thomas be rapidly unravelin’. Making a move on Anucha Browne Sanders in private was damaging enough. Making a move toward Quentin Richardson during an ignominious Knicks loss at Charlotte, and having to be restrained by assistant Herb Williams, is a blinking-red neon sign the coach is beggin’ to put out of his misery.

When players embarrass their coach by allowing the 29th worst offensive NBA team to score 67 points in the first half and a coach embarrasses his players by yanking them in the first couple minutes of the third quarter, it clearly shows they have no use for each other, no matter how much both parties tried to compound out the scuff marks after taking verbal shots at each other.

“You’ll almost never see Isiah blow a fuse when players make the team look bad. But he’ll turn on you in a split second the moment he thinks you’re making him look bad,” said someone who possesses first-hand knowledge of Thomas’ violent temper.

To be perfectly fair, Thomas isn’t remotely the first coach to yank players off the floor after one mistake of commission or omission. Happens all the time. Paul Silas and Eric Snow got into it several years ago in Cleveland, for example; the player got suspended one game, the coach got liquidated soon after. Especially when there’s a preponderance of previous evidence to support a lack of effort, unsavory shot selection, whatever.

Still, the last thing a coach should want is to show up a player, particularly a veteran. Thomas pulled the same stunt in Indiana with Ron Mercer and Travis Best. Unless that’s exactly what the coach wants to do in order to send a callous message to the rest of the players. Knowing this unstable group, they’re more apt than most to take it the wrong way.

Evidently Thomas’ agenda was to let ’em know nobody is above being publicly demeaned. At the same time, it’s not as if he singled out Richardson, he also fork-lifted Eddy Curry. Not surprisingly, Q, an hombre from the same serrated streets as Thomas, took it to heart and exchanged some invective (“That’s how we do in Chi-town”) with his homey.

Again, coaches and players talk dirty and sell woof tickets to each other all the time. Has there ever been a season when Jerry Sloan didn’t get it into on the bench or in the locker room with a player? And sometimes his name wasn’t even Greg Ostertag. Last season, it was Andrei Kirilenko. This season it’s Gordon Giricek.

But Sloan’s Jazz (15-13), though losers in eight of their last 10, reached the Western Conference finals last May. He’s been around long enough to treat or mistreat players any way he pleases. Same goes for Phil Jackson and Pat Riley and Gregg Popovich, but that’s about it. No way a coach can get away with challenging players to combat, especially not one whose team is 8-18, tied for the third worst of 30 and has been a perennial stumblebum in the four years since James Dolan and Steve Mills chug-a-lugged the Kool-Aid.

As always, there has to be someone who’s last to know. Regrettably for Knicks fans, that person happens to be the Chairman of Camp Cablevision. Either Dolan is in a torture mode of Thomas, or he fails to understand, honestly, that entrusting the Knicks’ restoration to an unqualified executive might not have been the best idea he’s ever hatched.

If I’m out of line here, I apologize, but I’d just like to remind Dolan, who has a little experience in one-day-at-a-time type of problems, that recognizing you have a problem is the first step toward recovery.

In the meantime, this is the longest wake on record. Unless you count the King Tut tour that’s staging a revival after 30 years.

Question is, poses a Boston talk show host, “When Dolan does fire Thomas, how long will the Knicks sit Shiva?”

peter.vecsey@nypost.com