Maybe Jason Kidd should get divorced more often.

While details of his personal life play out across local gossip columns, the Nets point guard is doing a heroic job of blocking out the distraction. Kidd has led the team on its first sustained stretch of excellence all season, winning seven out of nine games, and as a result the Nets are back in the East’s top eight heading into tonight’s showdown with the Knicks. Included in the run were two 18-point comebacks against the Bulls, a 15-point smackdown of division rival Toronto, and Monday’s tour de force against the soon-to-be-overhauled Pacers.

Kidd’s play in that stretch has been breathtaking, even by his usually high standards, averaging 17.4 points, 8.6 rebounds, 8.0 assists, and 2.3 steals. His notoriously shaky jumper has come around as well, as he’s made 22 of 45 3-pointers during the run and shot a healthy 49% from the floor. Kidd even had a rare “4×6” in a loss to Minnesota last week — 24 points, 13 assists, six rebounds, and six steals.

What’s amazing about Kidd’s tear is how it arrived completely out of the blue. During his career, he has been remarkably consistent from year to year. Using my Player Efficiency Rating (PER, a perminute rating of a player’s statistical effectiveness), Kidd’s past three seasons graded a 19.7, 19.6, and 19.2. On December 27, Kidd’s PER stood at 19.3 — right in line with his typical numbers.

At that point, the Nets stood at 11–18, Nenad Krstic was out for the season, and Rod Thorn was starting to work the phones to get a handle on what the market was like for Kidd and Vince Carter. But Kidd’s PER since then is a majestic 26.7, which for the season would be the third-best mark in the entire league.

Better still, he’s helped to improve the defense, too. Kidd was an All-Defense selection a year ago, but in the early part of this year quick guards gave him a lot of trouble — a weakness the departed Jacque Vaughn used to help cover.

In recent games, however, he’s done a much better job of staying in front of his man, even against small, quick guards. He shut out Toronto’s pint-sized speedster T.J. Ford last week, for instance, and hounded Indiana’s elusive Jamaal Tinsley into a 2–for–7, fourturnover nightmare on Monday. And of course, his blanket coverage of Chicago’s Ben Gordon helped fuel both New Jersey comeback wins against the Bulls.

As a result, the Nets’ overall defensive numbers are vastly improved. Nine games ago, New Jersey ranked 16th in the league in Defensive Efficiency (my measure of a team’s points allowed per 100 possessions). Since then, their mark of 99.0 is much more in keeping with the defensive tradition of the Kidd-era Nets; for the season this would rank them fifth.

Moreover, Kidd’s recent stretch has him on the cusp of several individual accomplishments. He’s moved himself back into position for an All-Star selection, which would be his first since 2003–04, and now ranks second in the NBA at 9.2 assists per game.

And then there are his rebounding numbers. Kidd is far and away the top rebounding guard in basketball, pulling down 8.3 per game. The next-best is Vince Carter, way back in the wilderness at 5.9. (For the cynics in the audience, yes, the rebound allergies of Jason Collins and Clifford Robinson probably have something to do with this, but it’s still an incredible feat). Kidd is one of the best rebounding guards in history, but his average this year would shatter his career high — a remarkable achievement considering he turns 34 in March.

For those of you who like to see the glass as half-empty, Kidd’s recent burst of excellence also contains some cautionary notes for the Nets. Most specifically, what if this is just a random nine-game burst and he goes back to being the same old 19.5 PER Jason Kidd we’ve known for the past four years? If that’s case, the Nets’ recent surge would be a mirage, and soon enough they’d start backsliding from the division leaders … even in the lowly Titanic Division.

That’s why tonight’s game against the Knicks, and the West Coast trip that follows, takes on added importance. While it’s just a January game against a bad team (er, sorry Knicks fans), if New Jersey is going to survive its fairly daunting schedule between now and the All-Star break, it needs Kidd to keep playing like Superman. The Nets play 10 of their next 13 on the road, and the Sixers look like the only gimme on the slate.

So whether it was the divorce, a glorious fluke, or some other cause, the importance of Kidd’s divine play of late is that it raises the Nets from pretenders to contenders in the Titanic. Thus, the big question for New Jersey in the coming weeks is whether Kidd’s nine-game stretch of brilliance will last the rest of the season, or if it will flame out and leave the Nets looking like their ragged, undermanned selves again during a grueling stretch of the schedule. Tonight at the Garden, we’ll begin to learn the answer.

jhollinger@nysun.com