Finally, it’s over.

The irony of Lenny Wilkens’s last game as coach of the Knicks is that, for once, the coach didn’t bungle a late game situation. They lost, of course, but Lenny made all the right moves in the final minute against the Rockets on Friday.

Wilkens appropriately called a clear out for Stephon Marbury – who was guarded by a bigger, slower Bob Sura – on the Knicks’ final possession. It didn’t work because Marbury and Jamal Crawford played a game of catch at the 3-point line while the shot clock ran out. You can’t blame Wilkens for that.

Then, on the final Rockets possession, Wilkens ran extra defenders at Tracy McGrady and forced the Rockets to win on a contested, running floater by a jump-shooting power forward. Alas, to Scott Padgett’s credit, he made an against-all-odds heave to beat a team that can’t catch a break right now.

As a Knicks fan, that’s easier to live with than seeing your team forget to foul in the last 30 seconds or commit some of its other recent late-game transgressions. So, given that the loss was due to raw misfortune rather than poor strategy, why would Lenny resign?

As you might have guessed, he didn’t jump from that ledge – he was pushed. The debate rages whether it was owner James Dolan or General Manager Isiah Thomas who made the call to can Wilkens after the Knicks’ ninth loss in ten games. Regardless, the Knicks’ line about Wilkens leaving to tend to his ill mother was about as believable as some of the plot lines from Desperate Housewives.

I suspect it was Dolan’s call, because the timing made no sense from Thomas’s perspective. The right time to drop Lenny would have been after a difficult run of schedule, with a slate of easy games to break in the new coach – right after the Knicks’ upcoming road trip, in other words.

That trip is part of an enormously difficult nine-game stretch – home against the Suns, Cavs, and Heat, and a road trip against the Pistons, Clippers, Nuggets, Kings, Suns, and Jazz. The Knicks are likely to be the underdog in every one. That means Isiah will catch more heat in two weeks when the Knicks have plummeted to about 19-30.

But now that it happened, where to from here?

In hiring assistant Herb Williams to coach the team for the rest of the season, Zeke passed up longtime friend Mark Aguirre, whom many columnists (guilty as charged) had presumed would be Wilkens’s successor when the Isiah-Lenny tag team met its inevitable end.

Williams is likely a caretaker for what the organization now views as a lost season. If he can somehow get them back into the playoffs, then great. If he can’t, it won’t be a big deal, because the Knicks will focus their attention on hiring a big-name coach like Phil Jackson or Larry Brown over the summer.

Of the two, Brown is the far more realistic alternative. Jackson and Thomas have big egos and have been rivals their whole careers, while Brown and Thomas are friendly through their mutual Indiana connections. The fact that Brown already coaches another team obviously is a bit problematic, but rumors are growing that the Pistons will let their famously nomadic taskmaster leave after the season.

If so, the Knicks job would no doubt be attractive to the native New Yorker; we’ll just have to hope it works out better than his stint with the Nets.

In the meantime, it’s Herb Williams’s show, and the Knicks still have half a season to play. With the recent depressing stretch of basketball and the onerous upcoming schedule, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that, as of tip-off yesterday afternoon, the Knicks remained just a game-and-a-half out of first place in the Atlantic Division.

Williams can make several changes that could help the Knicks turn things around. He started doing just that during yesterday’s 101-96 loss to the Bucks, inserting Trevor Ariza into the starting lineup and having him split time at the spot with Jerome Williams. Former starter Tim Thomas stayed tethered to the bench.

It’s been obvious for a long time that the Knicks play some of their best basketball when Jerome Williams is on the court, and some of their worst with Tim Thomas, so this move was long overdue. The Knicks need Williams’s defense and, above all else, his energy. Moving him to small forward also frees up more minutes for Michael Sweetney up front – the promising big man played 37 yesterday after averaging 16 under Wilkens.

Above all, the new coach must improve the Knicks’ defensive intensity. Inserting Williams would be a start, but the Junkyard Dog’s infectious energy has to spread to players like Marbury and Crawford, who have been far too content to play token D and save their energy for offense. Wilkens couldn’t or wouldn’t motivate those players to give more effort; Williams must, if he still wants to be the coach after this summer.

Even if Williams accomplishes all of that, he still faces an uphill climb with a Knicks team that, despite Isiah’s preseason delusions of grandeur, is deeply flawed. In that sense, Wilkens’s firing served as further proof of those weaknesses, which will undermine his successors unless Isiah addresses them. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Lenny Wilkens or Phil Jackson on the bench if the guys on the court aren’t good enough.