New York’s least favorite sideshow, the 17-45 Knicks, reared their ugly head this week and began to spew nonsense. Point guard Stephon Marbury insisted that he be given greater freedom to run the offense and even install an up-tempo offense if he sees fit. Coach Larry Brown hinted broadly that Marbury may need to go, and most sources are reporting that the Knicks will shop their point guard aggressively after the season. Isiah Thomas was nowhere to be found, which is about the smartest thing he’s done in months.

To paraphrase Laura Ingraham, shut up and play basketball. The only thing these guys do when they run their mouths is reveal how out of touch they are with the reality of their situation. Marbury seems to have lost touch with what kind of offense he favors and Brown is illustrating why no one has ever given him free rein over personnel decisions. Their words are merely compounding the shrill mess that makes this team an embarrassment to the hard working people who root for them.

First of all, Marbury is one of the better point guards running a half court in the NBA. That may be one reason he hasn’t spent a full season running a team that has finished in the top third of the league in Pace Factor (possessions per game) since 1998, his last full season in Minnesota. Early during the following season, he requested a trade. In Marbury’s two seasons with the Knicks, he has run teams that have each finished 17th in Pace Factor, and he had the clout to run roughshod over coaches like Lenny Wilkens and Herb Williams and go up-tempo if he wanted to. He clearly didn’t, and for good reason: The half court favors Marbury’s ability to create his own shot or develop shots for others off the pick and roll.

Marbury’s comment reeks with intelligence compared to Brown’s intimations that the roster needs to be changed over if the Knicks are to win.

Brown has been coaching professional basketball since the latter stages of the Nixon administration, and his excellent work on the sidelines has earned him a spot in the Hall of Fame. You would like to think he’s learned a few things about the NBA personnel market during that time, but his remarks suggest that he’s plainly ignorant on the rudiments of trading players.

To trade a player, another team has to want him and be able to accommodate him within the guidelines of the salary cap. Given the ridiculous salaries given out to players like Golden State’s Troy Murphy ($58 million through 2011), Boston’s Raef LaFrentz ($36 million through 2009), and the Lakers’ Kwame Brown ($25 million through 2008), it’s clear that most NBA general managers and team presidents aren’t very good at projecting player value and don’t grasp the impact of large contracts on the salary cap.

However it’s entirely unrealistic to assume there’s a receptive market for a perimeter player who is known to be surly, has never played for a team that has won more than 45 games or advanced past the first round of the playoffs, and is 29 with more than 28,000 NBA minutes on legs and ankles that have required some off-season surgeries.

Even if there were a market for Marbury, there’s another reason he can’t be traded: his contract. Starbury is due $60 million through 2009. While the Knicks have made a mockery of the sort of fiscal restraint the salary cap aims to impose, the reality is all but two NBA teams are over the salary cap. The two exceptions, Atlanta and Charlotte, have committed to building with young players. This means that if the Knicks were to find a willing partner for Marbury’s contract, they would have to take back $20 million a year in unwanted contracts. For this reason, Marbury is the very definition of an untradeable player.

Sadly for Knicks fans, it’s not just Marbury. Steve Francis, Jerome James, Jamal Crawford, and Malik Rose have just as little marketability. They have long contracts that are well beyond their present market value. Even players who have some trade attraction like Maurice Taylor (due to his expiring contract), Eddy Curry, and Quentin Richardson have had their market standing damaged by this train wreck of a season. About the only folks who look good are the rookies, and the former coaches, who can smile to themselves knowing they did more with a less talented roster than Brown has accomplished with this team.

No one is getting voted off the island. Not Marbury, not Brown, and hopefully not even Isiah since the Knicks have two late first-round draft picks this year and Thomas’s most unequivocal success is drafting after the lottery. Instead of carping at each other and playing king of the hill via the press, Brown, Marbury, and Thomas need to settle down and try to do what good teams do during blowouts: finish on a positive note to build some momentum into the next campaign. Otherwise, the only folks who will care about the Knicks melodrama are Chicago Bulls fans, since their team owns the Knicks’ first round pick; with each Knick loss, the chances of that pick being the no. 1 overall grow.

Nobody really cares about a sore loser’s gripes, and the Knicks’ bitching is particularly empty because this team has underachieved so badly. The best thing for everybody on the team, its coaching staff, and its management would be to keep their attention on the court and out of the press.

mjohnson@nysun.com