Has it been two weeks already?

Almost.

Isiah Thomas sidestepped a tough question two weeks ago, noting it would be fair to ask whether something needed to be done to address his status as head coach if the Knicks did not improve over the next couple of weeks. They are 1-4 since then.

So the question was alertly raised yesterday after practice.

“We’ll keep moving in this direction,” Thomas said.

And what direction is that?

“Me as the coach,” Thomas said.

I know a lot of us were thinking south right before the actual answer was offered.

Really, it’s not a surprise to find out that Knicks president Isiah Thomas has no intentions of dumping Knicks coach Isiah Thomas, but it’s a good way to check the man’s resolve.

He isn’t walking away from the sidelines and heading back upstairs to orchestrate the rebuilding from the front office.

Knicks owner James Dolan is going to have to fire Thomas, who’s failed to inspire. And with an 8-21 record, the players know there are not a lot of alternatives left.

Maybe a blockbuster trade?

It seems like something needs to happen. Nothing else has worked.

“We’ve tried everything. We’re trying to get wins,” Zach Randolph said. “He’s doing the best he can. It’s up and down. It’s frustrating, but he’s doing the best he can.”

Eddy Curry believes the status of Thomas is in the back of everyone’s mind.

“It’s not in the back of my mind,” Randolph said. “It really ain’t. I don’t know. It might be on some guys’ minds, but I just want to win and do the best we can do. We can’t give in. It’s too early.”

Jamal Crawford acknowledged the questions about the future of Thomas are unavoidable.

“When you hear it everywhere you go that’s difficult,” he said. “But me personally, seeing how he keeps us prepared, I know that it’s not him.”

On the injury front, Crawford believes he’ll be ready for Wednesday’s game against Sacramento. He did not scrimmage yesterday, but was shooting with a padded glove on a bruised right hand. Crawford swears he connected on 42 of 45 attempts.

Layups?

“No,” he said. “Mid-range. Just inside the arc.”

Curry was defending.

Bad joke. Sorry.

Stephon Marbury went the distance in practice. He still isn’t allowed to speak with the media. That might happen on Wendesday postgame. Thomas is letting Marbury decide whether to play or not, depending on his emotional state.

The conditioning is still a work in progress.

“He looked good,” Thomas said. “He got winded a couple of times. But the good thing about these kinds of athletes is they’re able to bounce back quickly.”

Curry was on the receiving end of a verbal shot from Thomas, who responded to the centerpiece saying there’s nothing he can do about the decision to bring him off the bench.

“If anything, I’ve shown I’m going to try to play the best people,” Thomas said. “The people who play the best, that’s who you want to play. Now to his credit, he did come in and have a good game yesterday. He had 12 points and eight rebounds. It shows me, while he may not like the bench, it definitely had an effect on his rebounding effort. If he continues to rebound, then the minutes are there.

“From that position, we need rebounding and some shot blocking. And if you can’t get the shot blocking, then you definitely need the rebounding. But you can’t get 16 points and two rebounds. That doesn’t work.”

No argument here.

It certainly seems like the Knicks have become increasingly confused by all of the lineup shuffling.

And you can add in angry.

“I don’t know what is going on,” Zach Randolph said of the struggling offense.

He’s not alone.

Right now, Isiah Thomas appears to be struggling to find a way to divide up minutes between Randolph, Eddy Curry and David Lee.

How about a trade?

Randolph got 38 minutes this afternoon despite starting out 3 for 16 from the field. Lee got 36 minutes despite spending 10 minutes idling on the bench after starting 3 for 3 from the field. Curry got 22 minutes and was clearly upset.

He last came off the bench Dec. 28, 2005 while getting back into shape after missing four games with a sprained ankle.

“I’m definitely not embracing (that role), but what can I do?� Curry said. “I have to go out there and use the minutes I have and try to be productive. And if I don’t play a lot of minutes, I don’t play a lot of minutes. There’s nothing I can do. I can’t sub myself into a game. I’m not going to go to him crying and whining. That’s not me.�

Unless he finds a way to make it work, Thomas is going to have to admit he made a mistake committing to this group.

• Check out Fred Jones’ plus/minus.

• Thomas dusted off Renaldo Balkman and Mardy Collins, but neither played did anything to make him find a couple of minutes for them in future games.

• Ben Gordon talked about what happens when a struggling organization fires a head coach. “I think anytime there’s change, it’s not necessarily bad,â€? he said. “Sometimes you need change to kind of get things stirred up and get to playing well again.”

• What happened to the protest? I went out to the marquee around 11:30 a.m. expecting to see a couple of disgruntled fans. Nobody was out there making a scene. There was just one guy carrying a sign, but he was advertising a fur coat sale.

There’s been another lineup shift.

Jamal Crawford isn’t playing. He got the bruised right hand x-rayed before the game, and no break showed up. Even so, Crawford isn’t playing. Eddy Curry is also headed to the bench.

So the lineup is, Jared Jeffries, David Lee, Zach Randolph, Quentin Richardson and Nate Robinson.

It’s going to be a long day unless Randolph and Curry both find a way to contribute something.

Stephon Marbury was here early, getting some conditioning work in. He’s inactive, and will likely stay that way until the wind is re-established. Marbury is likely a couple of days away. He’s not speaking to the media yet, either, which is fine. Nobody should be forced to recount an emotional struggle in front of cameras and microphones.

And in case you were sitting at home worried, Jerome James passed his fitness test. But the surgically-repaired foot swelled up shortly thereafter, so it’s going to be a while longer before he shows up in uniform.

I’m off today, but the Knicks are working through one more practice before taking on the Chicago Bulls.

For the last couple of weeks, Isiah Thomas has quietly wished for a couple of days in the gym to smooth out some of the wrinkles. We’ll see tomorrow what he got accomplished and who listened.

So far, nobody’s ruling out a reunion of Eddy Curry and Zach Randolph.

I doubt it’s going to happen, though, unless the offesne was significantly adjusted to keep them away from each other.

Read my print story today if you’re wondering about Renaldo Balkman, the link is lower on the page. He’s not the only player who’s not shown any improvement. The list has grown significantly this year. And some of that is due to utilizing a smaller rotation.

And if you plan to protest tomorrow, drop me a line. We’re always looking for a good story.

Since we don’t see much of practice any more, the easiest way to judge the workout is to eyeball the amount of sweat on the practice jerseys.

It looks as though Isiah Thomas ran the Knicks around pretty good today.

They were on the court a good two hours. And only a couple of guys hung around to get up some extra shots, which means the legs were a little wobbly.

It wasn’t a big news day.

Roy Jones Jr. dropped by to run a few sets with the Knicks, and promote his upcoming fight with Felix Trinidad. It was kind of a scripted moment since the fight just happens to be taking place at Madison Square Garden.

Nobody asked Eddy Curry or Zach Randolph to weigh in.

“Everybody goes through ups and downs,” Jones said. “I’m the perfect guy for ups and downs. Anybody can look at my career and see that. Unless you go through the ups and downs you don’t know how good you are or how good God is to you. How you come back is what makes you. That’s why I am where I am now. That’s why I stopped by to see them. I just wanted to tell them you can’t give up. Your time will come.”

He seems to come from the Don Nelson school of thought.

“Attack. Attack. Attack,” Jones said. “The best defense is a good offense.”

Maybe the Knicks should take that approach to heart. They are not built for stopping opponents, so why not run up the score? With more possessions, they could keep Curry and Randolph happy.

Thomas isn’t announcing the starting lineup for Sunday against the Bulls.

“We’ll keep moving things around,” he said, noting that all three days of practice will factor into the decision.

Starters wear blue jerseys in practice, reserves are in white.

At the end of practice today, Curry was in blue and Randolph was in white. That may not mean anything with another practice to go before a decision has to be made. Time will tell.

Malik Rose and Randolph Morris squared off in a sprint from end line to end line before they headed into the locker room. It was a case of age before beauty. Rose deserves a lot of credit for making sure the young players on this roster who don’t see much time push themselves and stay ready.

In response to the bold headlines a quick response from Isiah Thomas was about to generate, the Knicks got a hold of Stephon Marbury and got him to nail down a return date.

 Sort of.

Knicks vice president of public relations Jonathan Supranowitz dialed up Marbury, who indicated he would be on the court again after the new year.

So that ends another controversy.

Kind of.

Marbury won’t be around for Sunday’s game against Chicago, and probably won’t be able to get ready for Sacramento, which comes into MSG on Jan. 2. Perhaps he will be ready two days later in San Antonio when the Knicks begin a three-game road swing that will keep them away from the media crush for a total of five days.

I’ve never seen Eddy Curry mad, so I’m not sure how to label his mood after practice.

Let’s just say he was a little grumpy.

He still leaned against the wall and fielded all of the difficult questions. It’s pretty clear the struggling middleman craves stability, and this team is anything but of late.

How many lineups did Larry Brown use?

“When you’re not winning games, you gotta empty the tool shed,” Isiah Thomas said. “Clearly, what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working. Everyone had a nice comfortable role, knew their minutes, knew when they were coming in, but at the end of the day you sit here at 8-20.”

Zing.

“Right now, nobody’s comfortable,” Curry said.

Touche.

“I think with Eddy right now, there definitely is an adjustment that he’s going through,” Thomas said. “Last year, our whole offense was centered around him so there was enough time and enough touches in a game that he could always get rhythm and good numbers.”

Good point.

“My game definitely hasn’t taken a step back,” Curry said. ”(The situation is) just different.”

Back and forth.

Curry was disoriented after picking up two quick fouls and sitting for 34 minutes before getting up to start the fourth quarter.

“The whole third I kinda felt like there was a possibility I might go in,” Curry said. “As the minutes wound down in the fourth quarter, I became more of a cheerleader and my body just kinda shut down a little bit. I wasn’t warm at all. I gotta do a better job of being ready I guess.”

I think he meant after the plug was pulled.

Either way, Thomas didn’t like hearing that somebody was shutting down mentally on the bench.

“We sure as hell hadn’t mentally shut down,” he said. “We hadn’t gone away from him in terms of not playing him the whole game. We just had a group out there that was playing well. Zach came in off the bench and got it going. David was playing pretty well. We just had a group that had a nice rhythm. We’re definitely not going away from him.”

So there.

And on the Stephon Marbury front, Thomas kind of threw a change up.

He was asked whether there was a chance Marbury doesn’t return this season. Point blank. There was no way to misinterpret the question.

“I don’t know,” Thomas said.

There’s potential for all kinds of speculation, but the Knicks continue to say Marbury is just struggling with a swirl of emotions following the death of his father.

“Our organization speaks with him daily.,” Thomas said. “It’s very safe to say he’s having a very difficult time.”

And we did ask why Renaldo Balkman didn’t show up in the new alignment.

“I thought Jared was playing well,” Thomas said.

Balkman appears to be paying a penance for defending very well in recent appearances.

Isiah Thomas let everybody sleep in this morning, opting to practice an hour later than usual.

They’re heading for the court now.

I’m starting to believe the next 72 hours will be the most important of the season. With three days of practice, Isiah Thomas is afforded the opportunity to make real changes. And we’ll see on Saturday whether the players are still on board.

The schedule has made if difficult to adjust before now.

And they might want to consider moving ahead without Stephon Marbury, who still isn’t with the Knicks when they need him most. It makes it hard to settle on a lineup when nobody’s sure whether another big adjustment might be looming.

It sounds like he’s not committed to playing basketball right now.

More from practice when they’re done in a couple of hours. Stay tuned.

So did all of the shuffling and re-shuffling work?

Who knows?

The quick departure of Eddy Curry makes it all but impossible to evaluate the lineup changes, and all of those 3s in the first half masked some of the deficiencies. While the Knicks were more active, they still gave up 50 points before the break and Orlando wasn’t getting much help from Dwight Howard.

It’s not a good sign.

More than anything else, the Knicks need a true point guard. Does anybody remember a guy named Stephon Marbury? He’ll probably have to do.

Jamal Crawford is doing a good enough job, but he’s better off the ball.

With two days to prepare for Chicago, it makes sense that Marbury would show up for practice tomorrow and start getting back into game shape. It sounds like He is really struggling to deal with the death of his father during the holiday season, but the speculation about other issues factoring into the extended leave seems to increase every day.

And this team can’t go forward until everybody is accounted for.

Um, never mind.

I guess we shouldn’t have assumed that Eddy Curry had somehow played his way to the bench. Zach Randolph is taking a seat, which is a huge surprise because he’s been the most productive guy in the lineup from night to night.

Chemistry appears to be the issue.

Jamal Crawford and Quentin Richardson are starting in the backcourt. Curry remains in the middle. Jared Jeffries and David Lee are going up front.

Time will tell.

I’m a little confused on the backcourt simply because Richardson is a step slow. He’s struggled to stay with mobile forwards, so I’m wondering how this makes the Knicks stronger defensively. That means doing a better job on the perimeter.

At the other end, don’t plan on seeing a lot of pick-and-rolls.

There’s nobody on the floor who can set the screen, then catch and shoot. Lee is beginning to show a little more range, but he needs a few more to drop to increase the confidence.

Let’s see what happens. The goal is to avoid another early double-digit deficit.