It’s your move, Isiah.

The Detroit Pistons threw an unexpected twist into the Knicks’ off-season yesterday when word leaked that they would buy out the final three years of head coach Larry Brown’s contract. While this doesn’t come as a shock to anyone who has followed Brown’s flirtations with virtually every available NBA coaching job over the past six months, most expected the two sides to kiss and make up in the hunt for another ring next season.

Instead, Brown has now surpassed Phoenix’s Joe Johnson as the NBA’s most coveted unsigned free agent. And he might get more money, too. Knicks team president Isiah Thomas has been waiting for months to see how Brown’s situation in Detroit would resolve itself and reportedly will offer Brown a mammoth contract once he’s set free.

Obstacles stand in the way, however. Brown coached last year with a painful bladder complication from his hip surgery. While it’s clear that he could continue coaching since he managed to stay on the bench with Detroit throughout the playoffs, it’s less clear that he would want to endure it. If that’s the case, Brown is likely to spurn the Knicks and take a job in management with another team, possibly the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Then there’s the matter of whether Brown would want to coach the Knicks. While his oft-cited utterances about New York being his dream job certainly give Knicks fans cause for optimism, Brown may have been speaking more generally about the city rather than this particular roster. The Knicks are mired in a rebuilding mode, yet are capped out until sometime after Haley’s Comet returns, and Brown’s experience coaching Stephon Marbury in the Olympics was apparently not his most fond one.

Thus, whether Brown would want to coach New York is uncertain. However, New Yorkers should be asking a more important question: Should the Knicks be willing to let Brown coach them?

On the one hand, the answer to this question seems obvious. Brown has instantly improved every team he’s ever coached — many of them dramatically. He instills a team-oriented style of play and a defensive intensity that has been notably lacking in Knicks teams of recent vintage.And he’s done some of his best work with point guards, which could have a tremendous long-term effect on Marbury.

But let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment and think about what hiring Brown would really entail. He might sign a five-year contract, but considering his nomadic history,how long would he really be the team’s coach? Two years? Maybe three, tops?

In that time frame, what would he be able to accomplish with this roster? Do the Knicks possess enough talent right now to contend for a championship in the next two years? Sure … in the Big East.

But compare the Knicks to Brown’s soon-to-be ex-team, and it quickly becomes apparent that New York falls far short. Only at point guard do the Knicks have an equivalent talent to Detroit’s, and they are dramatically worse at small forward and center. Detroit isn’t the Eastern Conference’s only contender, either. The Knicks also don’t have any talents comparable to Miami’s Shaquille O’Neal or Cleveland’s LeBron James, nor do they have the seemingly endless depth of Indiana.

Given those realities, rebuilding seems like a better option. But if Brown is the coach, rebuilding isn’t realistic. The Knicks won’t be paying him $10 million a year so he can go 33-49 and make two trips to the lottery while Channing Frye and Nate Robinson cut their teeth. Nor would it be acceptable to rein in the spending and try to get under the cap in two years, not when Brown’s tenure has only a 50-50 shot of lasting that long.

If the Knicks get Brown, they can’t even mention the “R” word. Instead, the goal will be to win immediately. And if that’s the case, the Knicks have to change strategies midstream.With a coach like Brown, there’s really no point in keeping Frye, Robinson, or David Lee, because Brown isn’t going to play them anyway. Few coaches have been more open about their preference for veterans over rookies — you can give Darko Milicic a ring if you don’t believe me.

Those are important cons to choosing Brown, but certainly there would be advantages, too. One imagines Brown would quickly get Marbury to share the ball much more than he has in the past. I’m sure he would impress upon Jamal Crawford the importance of shot selection and push Tim Thomas to go to the basket every so often. He might even get Jerome James to play hard once in a while.

But on balance, he’s the wrong coach for this team. New York needs somebody more along the lines of Paul Westphal — a guy who will play the kids, get the team running and expand the talent base so that,two or three years from now, a guy like Brown can come in and finish the job.

Another guy who might be a better fit, ironically, is Flip Saunders, who is expected to replace Brown in Detroit. As coach of the Timberwolves, Saunders did exactly the kinds of things the Knicks should be looking for now. He developed young players like Marbury, Kevin Garnett, and Wally Szczerbiak, which allowed Minnesota to blossom into a contender.

But if Brown does come to New York and terminate the rebuilding project, he won’t be the one who suffers. The Knicks will experience a nice shortterm blip and probably even make the playoffs, with Brown getting much of the credit. Two years later, when it’s all ready to crumble, he’ll be on to his next job while the Knicks are left to clean up the mess.

Unfortunately, it’s probably too tempting a panacea for the Knicks to resist, because as much as they talk about rebuilding, they’ve always been suckers for a shortcut. Their impending pursuit of Brown is just the latest example.

Mr. Hollinger is the author of the “2005–06 Pro Basketball Forecast.”