NBA

THREE-RING CIRCUS NEEDS QUICK CLOSE

THE words were spoken out doors, by one triumphant man in the midst of a vast park in downtown Chicago, but they could just as easily serve a couple of gentlemen who work a smaller venue in midtown Manhattan:

KNICKS BLOG

“The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year . . . but . . . I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make . . .”

Those were Barack Obama’s words Tuesday night. Both Donnie Walsh and Mike D’Antoni would be wise to incorporate them immediately in their private chats – if not their public proclamations. Because New York City, so hungry for competent basketball, seems perfectly willing to grant them a honeymoon, maybe even an extended one.

But there is a condition with that contract:

They need to keep the circus away, need to keep promoting the notion that the Knicks are run by professionals now, by adults who do things the right way and retain none of Isiah Thomas’ three-ring lounge act. They need to keep the banana peels out of the way.

And they don’t need a Steph Infection.

The Knicks won a fun game last night, outlasting the awful Bobcats 101-98 and spoiling Larry Brown’s return to the Garden. The Knicks will never be confused for present-day title contenders but these are the nights when they will at least be easy on the eyes, when they run and shoot and make your spirits soar and make them sink, sometimes on the same possession.

But remaining in the background is the Marbury Miniseries, the Saga of Stephon, spending another night in civvies on the sidelines and adding another level of intrigue to a season that everyone hoped would be relatively stress-free.

“I hope things work out well for Stephon,” Brown said. “I’m sure Mike and Donnie will figure out what’s best for the Knicks and what’s best for him.”

The problem is, so far, it’s clear that nobody quite knows what that is. The graver problem? It’s just as evident that the two men entrusted with instilling dignity and decorum into this rotting refuse were conflicted on the issue, at best, and sitting on separate pages of the corporate playbook, at worst.

After all of one week of a basketball season, four games worth of honeymoon, we are already beginning to detect a faint whiff of elephants and greasepaint, the early arrival of a circus that was supposed to spare us this time around.

Because somehow, after only a week of basketball season, for all their verbal double-backs and all their covered tracks, it is clear that D’Antoni had one idea of what to do with Marbury and Walsh had another. And that’s perfectly acceptable, a disagreement between coach and GM, except it would have been helpful to discuss those disagreements with each other before doing so with the world.

And, again, it is a circus conceived in silliness: if the philosophy is to bench Marbury, to quarantine him, to punish him, to squeeze him into forfeiting a few of the millions he’s got coming to him if he stubbornly sticks to his buyout wishes? Bully for the two of them. There aren’t five Knicks fans who would argue.

Walsh can’t trade Marbury, not unless he wants to throw his vow to rebuild in a wood chipper, and if he does he is as good as doomed in the job already. Eventually Marbury is going to be bought out or released. We know it. We get it. Everyone gets it.

But it better be the philosophy of both of them, or else they are sure to roil some old ghosts, ones that don’t just stop at Isiah and Larry but touch on Jeff Van Gundy and Ernie Grunfeld, Pat Riley and Dave Checketts, Rick Pitino and Al Bianchi. The Knicks aren’t unfamiliar with this tumultuous terrain. And they know as well as anyone how it usually shakes out.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com