NBA

No doubt Dim Jim will rehire Isiah

It should surprise nobody that James Dolan still wants to sneak Isiah Thomas into the side door at Two Penn Plaza, nudge him back onto his abdicated throne. Dolan is such a dim bulb it’s surprising there’s enough lighting on game nights for the Knicks and the Rangers to play. Although it might explain why they keep tripping over each other.

One more time we are reminded just how Dolan got to where he’s gotten, risen to where he’s risen.

Because he has the right last name.

Because Daddy, clearly, never said no to him, so why should he expect anyone else will?

Knicks fans, this is a temporary reprieve, and you know it. This is David Stern shaking his head one more time and trying to save the Knicks from themselves, trying to shame Dolan into doing the right thing, by declaring Thomas’ moonlighting with the Knicks as contrary to NBA policy — something he should have done when Dolan first approached him about this pending madness.

Shame? Dolan? There’s a lot the man doesn’t know, and shame is at the very top of the list.

“I continue to believe in [Thomas’] basketball knowledge, including his ability to judge talent,” Dolan said in a statement, and then he added what amounted to a raised middle finger pointed at his own fans: “He’s a good friend of mine and of the organization and I will continue to solicit his views.”

Of course he will. Of course he will. If there’s one thing Stern should know by now — something Knicks fans have come to know as well as the Garden’s pinwheel roof and the championship banners that haven’t been updated in 37 years — it is this: Whatever Dolan wants, Dolan eventually gets. You encounter a spoiled brat at the mall, you walk away from him, try to ignore him.

Knicks fans have no such option with Dolan. He never goes away. They are stuck with him, with his arrogance, with his impetuousness . . . and with his lingering man-crush on Isiah Thomas. So Isiah says he’s sticking by ol’ FIU, says he has decided to “rescind” his contract with the Knicks?

Sure he is. For now. If you think you’ve seen the last of Isiah prowling the Garden, haunting the folks there who actually have a conscience — and there are plenty of good people who work there, make no mistake, even if the owner is as intellectually bankrupt as any in sports — then you think you’ve seen the last cockroach in Manhattan. Cockroaches never die.

And neither does Dolan’s infatuation with all things Zeke.

If Dolan has even the thinnest regard for the people who still watch his basketball team — until they’re given a legit alternative in Brooklyn in a few years — he will take this as the do-over it’s intended to be, a chance to understand that the backlash that’s assaulted his team and its reputation wasn’t a media creation, or the reflection of a few loud members of the minority.

What David Stern did was usher the fox out of the hen house. For now.

Now, he needs to stay out.

Isiah said he has “the utmost respect for Jim Dolan, Donnie Walsh, Mike D’Antoni and the entire Knicks organization.” Good. This is how he can prove it: Stay away. Stay away from Walsh, who wanted no part of this reunification, who’s worked with Isiah in two different organizations, fired him from both, knows what a haunting, creepy presence he is. And knows he resides squarely in the owner’s breast pocket.

And this is how Dolan can prove to Knicks fans that he really does see you as something other than the level of sucker that would’ve made P.T. Barnum hot: by changing the locks on the Garden doors.

Stern did the Knicks a huge solid, forcing them to do the right thing at gunpoint, a path as foreign to the man who owns the team as Sanskrit (and shame on the NCAA for not beating Stern to the punch, by the way). Now it’s on Dolan to make sure it keeps.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not holding my breath.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com