NBA

McGrady sits in Knicks’ latest loss

Lucky the Knicks aren’t in a playoff race.

Otherwise, this Tracy McGrady experiment would be a disaster.

The audition of T-Mac took another lousy turn when he sat out the entire second half with his sore left knee. McGrady scored as many points last night as comedian Tracy Morgan, who sat courtside in last night’s 120-109 loss to the Grizzlies.

With McGrady missing, ex-Knicks power forward Zach Randolph, a newly minted All-Star, stole the spotlight, celebrating his Garden return with a monster night, scoring 31 points and securing a career-high 25 rebounds.

“I didn’t have it tonight,” McGrady said. “It was pretty tough out there for me moving around. I wasn’t going to try to push through it. It’s stiffness, pain. No reason to stay out there like that.”

In all five of his games, McGrady’s knee has been an issue at a varying level of degrees. Yesterday he was unable to take playing back-to-back nights and quit on the game after banging a 3-pointer off the back iron at the first-half buzzer.

“It was tougher for me,” McGrady said. “Usually in the first half, I’m pretty good. But a couple of trips up the court I noticed it wasn’t my night. I told you guys, I’m going to have some bad days and some good days.

“It’s nothing to be worried about, I can’t hurt anything,” McGrady added. “I just didn’t want to have a set´back.”

McGrady’s comeback is looking and sounding simi´lar to the multiple, failed comebacks of Allan Houston, who also had microfracture knee surgery.

The Knicks fell to 1-4 since the trade-deadline deals, have lost nine of 10 games, are 20-38 overall and lost their seventh straight home game.

When Randolph and Jamal Crawford were traded in November 2008 in the name of cap space, the Knicks were 6-5. Days later they dipped under .500 and have not been over .500 since. Meanwhile, Randolph, who had eight rebounds in the first three minutes, made the All-Star team this season, and Crawford is ready to break his league-high playoff drought with the Hawks.

For the second straight night, Al Harrington carried the Knicks with 31 points off the bench, even though he has had to play some center. Memphis outrebounded the undersized Knicks 52-32, with the Grizzlies securing 17 offensive boards. Late in the second quarter, the Knicks’ rebounding woes became glaring to anyone who has ever picked up a basketball. After center Marc Gasol missed his second free throw, nobody boxed out the shooter and Gasol easily retrieved it in the lane for an uncontested layup. Pathetic.

The Knicks looked to make it interesting by reeling off eight straight points, with struggling Danilo Gallinari burying a 3-pointer from the right wing, to knot the score at 107 with 4:04 left. But Memphis went on an 11-0 run as the Knicks fell apart, scoring just two points the rest of the way.

marc.berman@nypost.com