NBA

Chandler must swing back or Knicks will be KO’d by Pacers

INDIANAPOLIS — It’s entirely possible that whenever this season ends — this week, next week, next month — we will start to hear a few things about Tyson Chandler, about his neck, about his knee, about just how badly the late-season flu knocked out his legs and deflated his lungs.

To Chandler’s credit, we hear none of those things now. Even as he seemed ready to cough up a kidney yesterday, he insisted he feels terrific.

“Yup, I’m great,” he said, cutting that part of the interrogation off before it could get anywhere.

So what we’re left with is this: Chandler is not hurt. He is not hobbled. He is not heaving.

And he is also not having a very good time of things in these Eastern Conference semifinals. Roy Hibbert is dominating him. The other interior Pacers — David West, Tyler Hansbrough, Paul George — don’t fear him even a little bit as they power through the lane and crash the boards and generally make the Knicks look smaller and weaker than a CYO B-team.

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If we take Chandler at his word, then we have to take him to task: The Knicks have no shot at beating the Pacers in three of the next four games if he doesn’t play better. It’s really a simple equation. The Knicks can regain their scoring touch. Carmelo Anthony and J.R. Smith can go back to being bigger hit-makers than Lennon and McCartney. They can protect the ball like they’re wearing Pinkerton uniforms.

Won’t matter.

Chandler has to join the series. Quickly.

To a certain level, he accepts this: “Oh, absolutely. My job is to slow [Hibbert] down, regardless. … Him having a game like that [24 points, 12 rebounds] is unacceptable. He had a great game. But that’s the reason why it’s a series. You’ve got to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

That is accountability. That is what Chandler is known for, and that’s good. But the ellipses in that quote? This is what he said that’s missing: “I would like to see us execute the game plan a little bit better.”

And later, when the discussion turned to the 18 offensive rebounds the Pacers snared — many of them on Chandler’s watch — he spoke, as he did in the moments after the game, about other culprits: “A lot of [them were] put-backs. And that’s rotations. If one guy follows the assignment, the next guy has to follow the assignment. It can’t be one or two guys out there. It has to be an entire team. That’s where we’re falling short right now.”

Well, sure, that and Chandler is getting utterly manhandled by Hibbert. Maybe plus/minus isn’t your thing, but it isn’t an accident that Hibbert was plus-20 in Game 3 and Chandler minus-14. And yes: The Knicks have been remiss in fully executing their game plan, trapping the post, forcing the pace, forcing the Pacers away from the basket. That’s on the team as a whole.

The rest, though? That’s on Chandler.

Look, it’s never going to be easy for him to go stat-line-for-stat-line with an offensive-minded center like Hibbert because he simply doesn’t get a fraction of the opportunity Hibbert does. The Pacers’ offense almost always includes a dump-in to Hibbert in the low box; in the Knicks’ offense, Chandler touches the ball in three ways: a lob dunk, an offensive rebound, or at the high post when the guards try to create space for themselves. And that’s it.

“Yeah, I don’t get a lot of touches, and yeah, it’s definitely frustrating,” Chandler said. “It’s frustrating to have someone go at you on one end and not have the opportunity to go back at him. But that being said, their offense is run through him. And that can be a positive for us, if we play it correctly.”

Maybe that’s true. But so, too, is this: The greater positive for the Knicks is to have a fully engaged Chandler, a fully enraged Chandler, the version we saw most of last season when he was Defensive Player of the Year, the version that landed him on the All-Star Team this season, the version mostly has been absent since the night in Denver when he banged up his knee and exacerbated his neck.

Chandler is an unselfish player, a team player, leader, and all of those things are splendid. But he also must be a better player than Roy Hibbert starting tomorrow night. Because if he’s not, the Knicks are staring at the abyss.