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The urge, always, is to tinker. It’s what coaches do. Adjust here. Fine-tune there. Sometimes it pays huge dividends. More often, things that seem like good ideas in the darkened cocoon of a film room fail spectacularly when the X’s and the O’s are transferred to sweat and blood.
“Coaching,” Rick Pitino said at the Final Four this year, “is a lot more about failure than success. And good coaching is about maximizing the lessons of those failures.”
Hopefully, Mike Woodson’s attempts at mad science are over. Hopefully, the Big Lineup switch for Game 4, an epic fail that was a direct result of the way the Pacers had been man-handling the Knicks, is shipped away to the Attic of Bad Ideas, which is the way Woodson sounded yesterday when he hinted Pablo Prigioni would be welcomed back from his exile that kept him benched for all but four minutes of Game 4.
Hopefully, the Knicks will decide to be the Knicks again. For better or worse. For however long these Eastern Conference semifinals remain in play.
Listen, the Knicks didn’t win those 54 regular-season games in a lottery this year, no matter how much it has felt that way across the first 10 games of the playoffs — even, often as not, in the games the Knicks have won. Critics liked to pigeon-hole them as a byproduct of the 3-point line, but that was always far too simple and fundamentally wrong.
Yes, the Knicks took — and, in prosperous times, made — an awful lot of 3-pointers, and even in the season’s opening week the tsk-tsk-tskers pointed out that was no way to guarantee a long, happy life in the postseason. But it was as much how the Knicks generated those 3-happy nights that defined who they were.
They would establish pace, shot clock be damned. They would green-light just about everybody as long as they were open and had a good look. And while they weren’t exactly D’Antonian when it came to ignoring all things related to defense, they worried about defense on defense — and let the offense carry them.
Is that a formula to win a championship? In the NBA, in 2013, unless your formula includes legally binding LeBron James’ wrists and ankles while he’s on the floor, there is no potent enough witch’s brew to ensure that.
Should it be good enough to beat the Pacers?
Put it this way: I’d like to see them give it a try.
I’d like to see Woodson allow his team — and his system — to breathe, for as long as they stay alive in this series. Everything the Knicks have done so far has been a reactive counter-punch. They double- and triple-team Roy Hibbert, apparently confusing him for a young Shaq, and what that’s done has not only provided Indiana with piles of open 3s but now that the Pacers have made a lot of them they believe they should make them.
The Pacers, simply by being tall and long, have dictated this series, have forced the tempo and the agenda. Look, that may well be enough. We’ve seen enough of them to know that none of their three wins have exactly been flukes, even if the Knicks were mostly playing at 70 percent efficiency all three games.
But if the Knicks are really destined to go down in this series, to go out in two rounds without ever getting their swings against the Heat, at least let them go down in the manner in which they seized the season. Push the ball, take the first, best available shot.
Find minutes for Steve Novak and Chris Copeland. Nobody — not even their loudest supporters — will ever argue that either can guard a stop sign. Their flaws drive Woodson crazy. But they do one thing very well: They shoot the ball. The Knicks just lost back-to-back games in which they held the Pacers to 35 and 40 percent shooting from the floor. Defense isn’t the Knicks’ issue right now.
Woodson was at his best this year when he was a sheriff with minutes. Early on, he had no problem benching non-performers, and that meant everyone, even Carmelo Anthony, certainly J.R. Smith before it became a team rule that he never comes out, regardless of how poorly he’s playing.
Again: That might not be enough. The series might already be too far gone. The Pacers might really be this much better than the Knicks. Still, with elimination sitting one more 48-minute egg away, shouldn’t they shrug their shoulders and say, at the very least, “Let’s try this our way for a change.”
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com