As players, Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars were fire and ice. Hall of Famers who would seamlessly slide from hero to sidekick and back with one another as circumstances dictated, they went about their business from opposite perspectives while sharing a common and violent intolerance for losing.

They’ve taken similarly disparate approaches to managing their basketball teams, but this time the results are as starkly different as their methodology. I’m not sure if that makes an emphatic case for Dumars’ studied calculation over Thomas’ lead-with-your-chin mentality, but there you go. Is it what it is, as today’s deep thinkers are fond of saying.

These are trying times for the man most Pistons fans would say is the greatest player the franchise has ever known. The Pistons were laughingstocks when Jack McCloskey drafted him out of Indiana, and nothing characterized the franchise’s ascent to two-time NBA champions quite like Isiah’s raw competitiveness.

It’s what you always remember about him first – that defiant glint in his eye. The bigger the moment, the longer the odds, the deeper inside himself Isiah Thomas reached, back to his Chicago roots where drug dealers and bullies meant no tomorrow was guaranteed for the imp with the cherub’s smile.

“His competitiveness,” Flip Saunders said, on cue, when I asked him Wednesday for the first thing that came to mind about Thomas as a player. “He was a great competitor. Take away his skill and everything else – just his competitiveness, his will an desire to win. That’s why this right here is killing him.”

“This right here” was the 2-8 record and seven-game losing streak the Knicks dragged into The Palace for Isiah’s holiday homecoming, never mind the daily watch for the executioner’s visit, the New York tabloids pregnant with speculation of his imminent dismissal.

Outside the Knicks’ locker room before the game, you’d never know it. The same quick smile, the same smooth veneer, the same enveloping charisma that captivated Michigan 26 years ago – can it really be that long ago? – remains intact, though the lava bubbling inside him must be boiling Piston red by now.

Give him this: It was easier fighting long odds when he could transform his bottomless will into physical fury than now, when it must be conferred upon players with varying agendas and flickering passion, but he’s fighting the good fight.

Somebody asked him about that, about finding the right words to light a fire under his team, about hoping a player steps up and demands accountability from his teammates – the way Isiah himself often did as a Piston – and Isiah didn’t bite.

“It’s not about the players right now,” he said. “This is where coaching comes in and this is where I have to give my team enough confidence and enough courage to go out and compete and execute a game plan. If I’m depending on a player to do that, then I’m approaching the responsibility in the wrong place. This is about me doing a better job getting these guys to go out on the floor and have the courage and the toughness to compete and win a basketball game.”

The mystery is why he’s put together a team with so many players who’ve had their courage or their toughness or their desire to win – the essence of a team – questioned over and over again. The marquee Knicks – Stephon Marbury and Eddy Curry and Zach Randolph and Jamal Crawford – each have All-Star ability but all of them also carry large red flags in every general manager’s dossier on them.

The gut reaction is to give Isiah a break: New York doesn’t have the stomach to tolerate a rebuilding. So Isiah, the theory goes, had to come in flailing, had to paint with bold strokes. Had to do deals like the ones for Marbury’s bad attitude, Curry’s bad heart, Randolph’s bad karma.

But when you think about it, Isiah – ever defiant – should have tacked left and gone in the other direction. Defiant Isiah should have said, no, I don’t believe that garbage about New Yorkers. You’re supposed to be the most sophisticated basketball audience in the world? Then you’ll be able to follow along as I rebuild this team in my image – street fighters who’ll sink their teeth into your throat and won’t let go until you beg for mercy.

That would have been more true to his playing style. That would have been Isiah building a team in his image, street fighters who abhor losing, just as Joe D built one in his around selfless teammates who play with a calculated efficiency and are willing to slide seamlessly from hero to sidekick.

When they got around to asking him about his time as a Piston, he spoke wistfully of the way the town rallied behind the team and came to love the Bad Boys.

“There’s a great love affair here with the players and the community and I’m glad that still exists,” he said. “That’s what I have to do in New York – I have to get our team to bond with our community.”

The part of the equation they’re missing is having a team worth embracing. Isiah Thomas could have built a team in Joe Dumars’ image and accomplished as much, or he could have built one in his own. Instead, he has a team neither one can appreciate, never mind one capable of winning the championships they shared.