Put up or shut up, Melo

THIS IS PROBABLY an unknowable thing, for now and maybe forever, even for smart insiders and Kremlinologists who try to analyze what happens at James Dolan’s Madison Square Garden — where the Knicks have won exactly one playoff round since Dolan became the big basketball boss of the place — and why it happens, and keeps happening:

If it was Phil Jackson’s plan all along to do this kind of tear-down at the Garden, why did Jackson spend $124 million on Carmelo Anthony before starting the process?

You read all the things Jackson says now, lamenting the sad state of individual play in pro basketball, and wonder how he can possibly rationalize those opinions, obviously deeply felt, and still decide to build a winning basketball team around Anthony, now whining to his weepy friends, in and out of the media, about how he feels betrayed by Jackson.

This isn’t about what Jackson might say in public about Anthony, currently running a back-channel media and social media campaign against the Knicks’ selection of Kristaps Porzingis with the fourth pick of the draft on Thursday night, a selection that Jackson was right to make, by the way. This is just curiosity about what really happened the summer before this, when the Knicks decided to bring back Anthony so he wouldn’t go to Chicago or Houston or someplace else.

Did Phil Jackson really want to bring back Anthony, or did Dolan — the blues singer who keeps singing a song about all the autonomy Jackson has running the Knicks — tell him they couldn’t lose the one star the Knicks had?

Now Anthony has his money, because the Knicks could pay him a lot more money than anybody else could have, and he is stuck with Jackson and Jackson is stuck with him, and what could possibly go wrong with an arrangement like that going forward, even as Phil calls Anthony the Knicks’ “favorite son?”

You remember all the jive you were fed last summer, about how this was a New York thing with Anthony, as if because he was born in Brooklyn he is a true child of this city instead of Baltimore; and how he was accepting all the pressures and responsibilities of the city, the Knicks, the Garden, because he was practically euphoric in a New York state of mind. Right. As the late George Young, famously, once told me, “When they say it’s not about the money, it’s always about the money.”

Anthony was going to lead the Knicks into the future, you bet. Well, he ought to get ready to do that now and shut up. The biggest, current load of jive about Anthony, leaked to his admirers, is that the clock is running on him and he can’t wait two or three years for Porzingis to develop. But somebody has to explain why the other freshmen and teenagers in this draft were going to come to New York and turn the Knicks into some kind of winnow — or win-real-fast — team. I like Justise Winslow of Duke, for example, but when he fell to No. 10 and Miami the other night, people acted as if nine other teams had passed on his new teammate Dwyane Wade.

For all of the detached weirdness we have seen from Phil since he also took Dolan’s money and this job, he did right by the Knicks Thursday night with Porzingis and with Jerian Grant of Notre Dame, a big guard whose real position seems to be basketball player. People act as if that was the hard part. No, the hard part starts when Jackson is officially charged with recruiting free agents to come to New York and be part of the rebuild that now follows the tear-down of the New York Knicks.

Maybe he should take his favorite-son star with him, so Carmelo can find out how excited the most attractive free agents out there are about coming to play basketball with him.

Jackson is stuck with Melo, Melo is stuck with him. Once Jackson built teams around Michael Jordan and then Kobe Bryant. Now Carmelo Anthony. People talk about all the bad luck Anthony has had across his NBA career. But do you think the Nuggets would have made the Western Conference finals only once if they’d had Michael in his prime on those teams instead of Carmelo? What if they’d had Kobe? Come on. People persist on calling Anthony a superstar. He’s not, and never has been.

Now he is 31 and coming off knee surgery and you really do wonder what he thought was going to happen with the Knicks after he took all that money; what sort of rabbits Jackson was going to pull out of a hat; what All-Star team Jackson was going to assemble around him at the Garden. The truth of Anthony’s career in the pros was really found in London, during the Olympics, where he was at his best when he didn’t have to be The Man, not with LeBron and Durant in the gym. He had to come in and make some big threes and then go sit down.

Anthony wanted New York in the first place because he wanted to get paid, and Dolan was more than willing to make that happen, even if he had to trade half his team to do it. So you can imagine last summer that he wasn’t just going to let the guy walk and make him look bad, because that is the worst sin of all at Dolan’s Garden.

Now here we all are. Anthony won’t come out and say what he really thinks about this draft, he lets his coat-carriers do that for him, even as he is already doing damage control on Instagram. But if you think the original stories, about Anthony feeling betrayed and all the rest of it, were simply made up, think again.

He talked a good game last summer, he did, on his way to getting his money. But with that money does come responsibility. He is covered sometimes as if he’s some sort of iconic Knick. He’s not. You know who never complained about anything, on his own aching knees, who never treated aching knees like the opera? Patrick Ewing.

Either shut up and play, or stand up and demand to be traded, if anybody out there wants a 31-year-old player with a surgical knee making max money. Everybody always talks about what a good guy Carmelo Anthony is. This would be a good time for James Dolan’s star to act like one.