Somewhere, Don Chaney must be smiling.

A little less than three years ago, Isiah Thomas let Chaney, the former Knick coach, twist in the wind, subjecting him to fans chanting for his dismissal and endless speculation in the papers about his replacement, before giving him his walking papers. Now, it looks like Thomas is in for a very messy, very public denouement.

Thomas, is already on shaky ground given that his $140 million team has managed only eight wins going into last night’s action and that he himself has committed the flagrant foul of insulting the Garden faithful verbally (more than a few Knick fans would argue that Thomas’s job performance is also an insult).

But while speculation hits a crescendo about if and when Isiah will get the boot, a much more important issue is getting ignored. It’s widely assumed that organization soldier Herb Williams will take the coaching reins, but who will replace Thomas as team president? And what can they do? Thomas’s legacy is a mismatched roster full of young players and 36 months of fiscal insanity that would make the most pork-barrel-happy, spendthrift congressman blush with embarrassment. The team is over the salary cap until 2009 at the earliest and two of its next five first round picks belong to another team.

Hiring former Nugget team president Kiki Vandeweghe or some other veteran NBA insider will only compound problems, because it was a large helping of conventional wisdom that got the Knicks in this mess. It may take a Freedom Tower-sized list of outsidethe-box ideas to make the Knicks viable again. Here are a few suggestions:

Buy Marbury out. Although Thomas refitted the Knick roster and made big trades to obtain key players like Eddy Curry and Jamal Crawford, Stephon Marbury was Thomas’s first big acquisition, and he has been the public face of the team during Zeke’s tenure. The new GM will need to persuade team chairman Jim Dolan that paying $25 million to let Jalen Rose and Maurice Taylor walk away was a trivial investment, but spending $42 million to enable Stephon’s Garden exit is crucial.

On a symbolic level, letting Marbury go is a break with the team’s horrid recent past, but it also works on a practical level. In Crawford, Steve Francis, and Nate Robinson, the Knicks have players with similar skill sets and all evidence suggests that Marbury’s skills may have entered that steep decline that point guards suffer near or past the age of 30.

He’s an emblem of a past the team would like to leave behind, his role can be handled by others, and his value is rapidly eroding. You can’t trade a player like that who has a $20-million-a-season contract (there will be no takers), so the only sensible move for the Dolans and Isiah’s successor is to waive him and buyout the remainder of his contract.

Improve the European scouting and scour the D-League. In the past when the Knicks have scouted Europe, it’s resulted in draft picks like Maciej Lampe, Slavko Vranes, Milos Vujanic, and of course, Frederic Weis. However, when San Antonio, a team that doesn’t frequent the lottery, scouts and drafts Euros, they get Manu Ginobili, Tony Parker, Leandro Barbosa, Beno Udrih, and about three more players who will be in someone’s rotation in the next couple of years. The problem isn’t in the talent base, but in the Knicks’ ability to evaluate overseas players. Similarly valuable players like Chuck Hayes have emerged from the D-League. With little in the way of cap room or lottery picks, the Knicks will have to be aggressive and shrewd in their search for diamonds in the rough.

Connect with the past. The Marbury buyout should be announced as “addition by subtraction.” That was the phrase used to sell the fan base on a 1969 trade that sent center Walt Bellamy to Detroit for forward Dave DeBusschere. At the time Bellamy was a future Hall of Famer, and DeBusschere’s future entry into Springfield was much more in doubt. But the trade freed up minutes for Willis Reed (another future Hall of Famer), and it solidified the Knicks frontcourt for their championship era.

What people forget about those teams is that they were not a glamorous (Walt Frazier’s dapper sense of style notwithstanding). The championship era Knicks won and were loved because of their work ethic. So too were the best teams of the Patrick Ewing era. The glamour teams were well west of here; those Knicks teams won with grit. And they were and are still passionately loved by local basketball fans. It will probably take until the next decade before the Knicks can talk seriously about winning championships again, but they can lead with their grit and mettle tomorrow.

Knicks fans have endured seven years of incompetence during the administrations of Thomas and his predecessor, Scott Layden. During that time, the quality of play has declined almost inexorably and the team’s day-to-day operations have resembled those of a bad reality TV show. At this point a smartly run organization that produces a .500 team that hustles nightly — a reasonable short-term goal for the new administration — will look almost as magical to the fans as Willis hobbling out onto the floor for Game 7 in the 1970 Finals.

mjohnson@nysun.com