Finding good news during this latest run of horrid play from the Knicks may seem like finding a needle in a haystack (or its urban equivalent, finding a good, affordable restaurant in a non-residential area), but there is one encouraging sign from the Knicks on-court performance. Rookie weakside forward Wilson Chandler is beginning to look like a keeper.

The Knicks took Chandler with the 23rd pick of the first round last spring, but for the first three quarters of the season, they treated him as if he were on the team purely as a favor to someone management didn’t like. He played in only nine games before the All-Star break and in only two of those games did he receive more than 10 minutes of action.

Chandler’s lack of burn was especially curious. The one thing that most of Isiah Thomas’s most aggressive detractors laud is his ability to draft young talent. It seemed odd that he would turn his back on his latest pick.

It was also unusual that the Knicks chose not to play Chandler as they urgently needed a small forward. For most of the season, the Knicks started Quentin Richardson, a player better suited to play shooting guard (though the Knicks have no shortage of guards who shoot a lot), and the results were disastrous. Although Q’s play has improved somewhat in recent weeks, Richardson is suffering through his worst season as a professional; his shooting, theoretically his strong suit, has been horrid, and on defense, small forwards are routinely torching the Knicks. Yet Thomas stuck with his starting five for as long as possible. I guess his philosophy was if you can’t be right, then be stubborn.

Finally with the season slipping away, Thomas began to realize that there was talent sitting at the end of his bench. But rather than systematically developing a role for Chandler by playing him in selected spots, Thomas tossed the rookie in the deep end by having him guard LeBron James for 36 minutes on March 5. While everyone will remember that as the game that King James dropped 50 on the Knicks, don’t hold that too much against Chandler. The way he played that evening, James would have scored 50 on Dave DeBusschere when the Knick legend was in his prime.

What got lost in the shuffle was that Chandler had a nice evening at the offensive end. He scored 11 points on 44% shooting, and his tally included five rebounds, two assists, a steal, and a block. Not a bad night for a 20-year-old just getting started in the pros and having to guard an MVP candidate having the kind of night that justifies his eminence.

Chandler’s numbers since that night have varied dramatically, but much of that owes to Thomas’s bizarre personnel usage. There seems to be a phase in many Knicks games where Chandler is on the floor surrounded by teammates with no offensive ability whatsoever. Thus he’s forced to take bad shots since the opposing defense is keying on him. Well, no one argues that Isiah has a knack for developing the talent that he drafts and Chandler figures to be a fine case study in Zeke’s ineptitude as a coach.

Chandler’s play this weekend was the lone bright spot amid the blowout losses to Memphis and Minnesota. Against the Timberwolves on Saturday, he scored 12 on six of nine shooting. Against Memphis on Friday night, he notched 17 on 7–14 from the field. Add these performances to his game against Indiana last Monday night when he scored 15 points and grabbed eight boards, and you have an encouraging trend.

I’m not nominating Chandler for Rookie of the Year just yet. His performances also show that he has work to do. For instance, he doesn’t get to the free-throw line enough, and his defense, supposedly a strength, will need work. The Grizzlies’ Rudy Gay and the T-Wolves’ Ryan Gomes both beat Chandler repeatedly in the first quarters of the games this weekend. It was heartening, however, to see that Chandler learned from his early mistakes and as the game progressed he denied those players spots and areas where they had beaten him previously.

The remaining 12 Knicks games will be crucial to determining the immediate future of their small forward position. Whoever takes over the front office will need to clean house, yet the Knicks have few ways to sweeten deals to get teams to take their unwanted players off of their hands. Yes, there are two expiring contracts (Stephon Marbury and Malik Rose), but not much after that.

If the new general manager is to make moves, then he may have to deal some of the Knicks’ popular young players. David Lee should be untouchable in any deal that doesn’t bring back real superstar talent (real, as opposed to these faux superstars that Isiah has specialized in acquiring), but if Chandler’s emergence is for real, then hardworking forward Renaldo Balkman could be used as trade bait. Balkman is a useful player and a fan favorite for his hustle, but if the next GM comes aboard and sees a team with a surplus at small forward and deficits everywhere else on the floor, then the next move — trading the better known of the two — is standard operating procedure.

mjohnson@nysun.com