Walsh a ray of hope for change in Knicks’ culture

Between all the mortifying scandals and lawsuits and dead weight on the Knicks’ roster, it was hard to remember what credibility looked like and sounded like around the organization until new team president Donnie Walsh started talking. Just a few minutes earlier, his beleaguered coach, Isiah Thomas, vacated the same room after his own pregame talk.

Thomas had just drifted off on another of those “someday” rambles of his where he narrows his eyes and starts describing a time and a place for the franchise that’s far, far away from here where milk and honey will flow again, and a championship banner will be raised, and Isiah will still be here to tell us all he told us so. So laugh and mock me now, while you can, he said.

Forget that no one else -- including Walsh -- can see this make-believe world that Thomas regularly describes, this place where there exists, right now, a Knicks team that’s bristling with “young talent” and promise. “I think we’re positioned pretty properly,” Thomas said, ignoring the salary-cap hell the franchise is locked into, too.

But Walsh calmly made it clear that he doesn’t see the Knicks the same way. He was back at the Garden for the first time since his introductory news conference a week ago, and he didn’t hear a word of Thomas’ remarks. But the contrast between the two couldn’t have been greater or more reassuring once Walsh began to speak.

Unlike Thomas, Walsh doesn’t blow smoke or try to con people or talk as if he’s worried what owner James Dolan thinks. Walsh also didn’t minimize how bad the Knicks are.

He’s a native New Yorker and knows people here are impatient for big change. But he isn’t trying to make a big splash. He again said no decision on Thomas’ future will come until sometime after the season ends.

Walsh is working deliberately, by his own timetable and standards and convictions, because he clearly recognizes it’s not just the Knicks’ players or staff that needs to be overhauled. Walsh knows the entire culture of the franchise needs to change. That’s why Walsh keeps stressing he’s committed to “the integrity” of the evaluation process. And how that integrity “starts with me.”

Thomas was again saying he expects to be kept on. Walsh, when asked if he’s keeping an “open mind” on the coaching situation, said, “Yeah, you could say I’ll have an open mind as far as any conversation I’m gonna have. I still don’t think we’ve played well. So it’s not totally open. It’s not like I’m going to go in there and say, ‘Well, this has all been great! What do you want to talk about?’ ”

Even more forebodingly for Thomas, Walsh also suggested he should plan to be held accountable when they have their sitdowns. Walsh said Thomas needn’t bother with a “sell job” because, “That’s not the object. It’s to find out what’s been going on here. And I think Isiah is one guy that can do it because he basically got the players and he’s coached the players. So he should have an insight as to why this hasn’t worked this year.”

If Thomas offers up the same unhinged insights he has ladled out, he may talk his way right out of any job within the organization, not just his coaching job, which already seems a lock to go to someone else.

Thomas did himself no favors when he kept emphasizing that the Knicks haven’t won anything since the championship year of 1973. No smart executive would argue that he should keep his job because nobody else has succeeded, either. It’s a lousy argument, and yet Thomas kept on making it even after he was reminded that the Knicks made two NBA Finals since 1973. But Thomas didn’t accept the out. By the time he was done refusing to back down, he had -- without naming names -- managed to totally dismiss Pat Riley’s run here, and Jeff Van Gundy’s run here, and most grievously of all, Patrick Ewing’s great years just two days after Ewing was voted into the Hall of Fame.

What Thomas thinks mattered before. But it hardly matters at all now. Donnie Walsh is in charge. And change is going to come.