The holidays are over and it’s a fair assumption that most Knicks fans didn’t get the gift they wanted from their NBA team: a regime change. James Dolan is still the chairman and Isiah Thomas is still team president and coach.

At all but one of the holiday gatherings I attended, I was asked if there was an imminent end to the fiasco at Madison Square Garden, where fans chant nightly for a coaching change as the team suffers one blowout loss after another. The Knicks have lost by double-digit margins in seven of their 17 home games so far this season. My fellow partygoers wondered what could be done in the aftermath.

The first question has an easy answer. It’s unlikely that Dolan will fire Thomas, since it seems to Dolan that he would be giving in to mob rule by axing Thomas. But judging from the increasingly exhausted and exasperated tone of Thomas in his post-game news conferences, he may walk away before the season is over.

The answer to what happens next involves a Patrick Ewingsize irony. Whoever succeeds Thomas in the Knicks’ front office will have to employ much of the same personnel strategy that he used and work the margins to find new personnel. But this time, the implementation of that strategy will require one key factor that was the absent during the Thomas regime: risk assessment.

After watching this administration for four years, I have to staunchly disagree with the folks who say there wasn’t a plan. There was a plan. It involved remaking the roster by capitalizing on low first-round draft picks (a typically undervalued commodity), and by going aggressively after high-risk players who lacked other options in the free-agent market.

If forwards David Lee and Renaldo Balkman are any indication, then the draft strategy part of the plan is a success (though why Wilson Chandler doesn’t receive more burn is a mystery to me). One of the eternal mysteries from this era of Knicks basketball will be what would have happened if Thomas and Dolan were content to simply rebuild via the draft. The current team might have included center Joakim Noah and forward LaMarcus Aldridge, along with Lee, Balkman, and some scorers. Such a team might struggle on offense at times, but it would be one of the better defensive teams in the league, and they would certainly play hard every night.

The free agent part of the plan has been an unmitigated disaster to such a degree that not even Dino De Laurentiis or any other Hollywood disaster flick specialist could create anything paralleling the magnitude of what went wrong. Thomas’s free agent signings include centers Jerome James and Eddy Curry, guard Jamal Crawford, and swingman Jared Jeffries, and it illustrates the entirety of the problem with this regime. There’s no attention paid to risk assessment. Each of these players had a considerable downside — a smart GM would have offered each a contract no longer than three years. Three-year deals work well for both sides. For the team, it limits their liability. For a player — if he develops star-level talent — then he’s three years away from a possible nine-figure deal.

If Thomas had signed James to a three-year deal, then he could offer James in trade this season as an expiring contract. He didn’t (James is in year three of a six-year deal), and that illustrates the problem with hiring elite athletes to executive positions: Thomas was a Hall-of-Fame guard in his playing days, and he was accustomed to overcoming long odds every time he drove the lane against bigger opponents. His success on the court gave him a skewed perception of acceptable levels of risk. Thomas essentially bid against himself for Curry, a player with a health issues that prevent his contract from being insured. Crawford and Jeffries also have key weaknesses in their games. Committing to each for six years, as well as trading unprotected lottery picks for Curry was a strategy with a probability of success that was less than one in four. But Thomas, as a player, was used to beating those odds every time he took the court.

That’s why Thomas is one of the last of a breed: the star-player GM. Since Thomas’s hire by the Knicks in 2003, almost all of the new hires to lead NBA front offices have come from the ranks of seasoned executives, many with no playing experience whatsoever, such as Sam Presti in Seattle, Kevin Pritchard in Portland, Mark Warkentien in Denver, Ed Stefanski in Philadelphia, Bryan Colangelo in Toronto, and Daryl Morey in Houston. Others, such as Orlando’s Otis Smith, Phoenix’s Steve Kerr, and Cleveland’s Danny Ferry, were at best fine role players during their NBA careers.

It marks a key shift. Teams used to regard their personnel manager job first as a brand-building position, and second as a team-building position. There seems to be an increasing awareness that a winning team builds its own brand with each W.

This is very good news for Knicks fans. The next GM will need to think creatively to find ways to maximize the mismatch of talent that Thomas has heaped onto the Knicks’ roster and will have to seize opportunities to make trades. As long as the next team president understands risk assessment, he could get the Knicks moving in the right direction quickly. The problem is that they have such a long way to go.

mjohnson@nysun.com