We beat the Wizards! We beat the Wizards!

In the euphoria over Saturday’s buzzer-beating win over the East’s fifth-best team — which saw head coach Isiah Thomas and the Knicks enmeshed in an over-thetop celebration that you half-expected to end with them cutting down the nets in Washington’s MCI Center — the Knicks just can’t contain themselves.

Yesterday, New York announced that it would give a multiyear contract extension to team president and head coach Thomas, as a reward for … well, we’re not sure. But he did beat the Wizards!

True, the Knicks at the moment are in possession of the no. 8 seed in the East, which if it holds up for the rest of the year would give the team an unexpected playoff berth. But that has more to due with the rancid East than anything the Knicks have done. New York is only 29–34, and moved into the no. 8 spot primarily because they played only twice in the past nine days while everyone else was losing.

Knicks owner James Dolan still felt that Thomas had met his preseason ultimatum for “significant and evident progress” from the debacle that was 2005–06. On a strictly comparative level, Thomas indeed has passed this test. The Knicks only won 23 games a year ago, after all, and by this point last year, the players were openly mailing in games while all but ignoring head coach Larry Brown.

But before we get too far into my rebuttal, let’s start by giving Thomas his due for the positives. As a coach, he’s done a respectable job. He’s cajoled a career year out of Eddy Curry, got Stephon Marbury’s head screwed back on after a year of torture from Brown, and turned loose David Lee as a sixth man extraordinaire. He’s still had a few puzzling moments — for instance, why Lee hasn’t started is anyone’s guess — but on balance the Knicks play hard for him, and, his strategy has been pretty solid.

That said, some glaring holes remain in his coaching record. For starters, the Knicks still don’t defend worth a darn, and it’s hard to imagine them becoming more than a mediocre also-ran until they do so. Thus far this season New York ranks 27th out of the NBA’s 30 teams in Defensive Efficiency, my measure of a team’s points allowed per 100 possessions.

Compare that to last year, when they ranked 25th even though they basically quit over the season’s final two months, and you see how abysmal the ‘Bockers’ D has been. Despite the euphoria over their improvement, the Knicks have regressed at the defensive end — it’s only the offensive improvement that’s kept them in playoff contention.

In addition, there was the embarrassing fight between the Knicks and Nuggets, which resulted in multiple suspensions to players on both teams. Depending on whom you talk to, the fight may have been the result of Isiah ordering a Code Red on Carmelo Anthony, which is completely unacceptable behavior on the part of an NBA coach.

To their credit, the Knicks rallied together right after this event, and Thomas’s role in it hasn’t been proven beyond a few words he mouthed toward Anthony. But it still leaves a bad taste.

If you were strictly evaluating Thomas’s coaching record, you would have to conclude he deserved to stick around. The players like him, and the fact that they’re coming together right now, rather than pulling apart as they did a yea ago, is a great sign.

But the problem with Thomas, as always, is the damage he continues to inflict as team president. I’ve gone over his misdeeds many times before, so I won’t repeat myself now except for one area — the Eddy Curry trade.

We’ve seen some revisionist history on this deal, but as well as Curry has played this year it doesn’t change the big picture. The decision to trade two unprotected lottery picks for Curry may not end up as disastrously as it once seemed it would, but it doesn’t change how utterly reckless the decision was. It could still end up costing the Knicks the services of a superstar like Greg Oden or Kevin Durant, and of course it already cost them LaMarcus Aldridge, the second pick in last year’s draft.

Throw in midlevel exception disasters like Jerome James and Jared Jeffries, and the curious decisions to buy out Jalen Rose and Maurice Taylor when their deals could have been used at the trade deadline, and it’s clear Thomas keeps doing more harm than good in his role as team president. It’s even easier to see by looking at his trading partners — Phoenix, Chicago, and Toronto have all been rebuilt into strong teams largely on the strength of trades they made with Thomas.

Moreover, let’s look at the big picture for a moment. Seriously, how impressed are we supposed to be with a 29–34 mark when the Knicks are spending twice as much as most other teams? As Kevin McHale in Minnesota, Chris Mullin in Golden State, and Billy King in Philadelphia have shown, even the most incompetent GM can keep his team in the 35-win range if he’s willing to spend some money and avoid blowing the team up. That the Knicks can do this too shouldn’t be particularly surprising, and it sure as heck shouldn’t be cause for celebration.

Nonetheless, the Knicks were breaking out the party hats and noisemakers yesterday, even going to the unusual length of parading the reclusive Dolan in front of the press to discuss the extension. All this even though New York has 19 games left, only leads Orlando by half a game and New Jersey by one game for the East’s final playoff spot, and won’t have Jamal Crawford for the rest of the season. As ESPN.com’s Chad Ford said on his podcast, all that was missing was a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

Unfortunately, the misery for Knicks fans is likely to continue. There won’t be any more 23–59 snafus, not with Dolan’s deep pockets, but McHale has shown in Minnesota that even the most dimwitted GM can survive years of mediocrity if he has the owner in his pocket.

Thus, despite a track record that pretty much screams out for his replacement, Thomas will stay in charge for the foreseeable future. And after seeing such piddling performance compensated so generously, I’m left with only one question — how do I get James Dolan to be my boss?

jhollinger@nysun.com