Tim Hardaway may be through in the Eastern Conference semifinal series for the Heat. Maybe, he’s through with the Heat for good.

The 33-year-old, five-time All-Star who has been plagued with foot problems throughout the postseason – he sat the entire first round sweep of Detroit – said after yesterday’s 91-83 defeat against the Knicks that he is going to sit and discuss his plight with Pat Riley and determine if he is doing more harm than good at this point.

After Hardaway, a free agent in waiting, sat the final 13:32 of yesterday’s Game 4 at the Garden, one of the media types asked him, “At what point do you say, ‘My foot is preventing me from being the player I can be…'”

“‘…and I’m hurting the team?'” Hardaway finished. “I don’t know. We’ll see. I’m going to talk to the coach and try to find out and just go from there.”

When asked if he might already have reached that point, Hardaway abruptly shot back, “I just said I’m going to talk to the coach and we are going to talk about it.”

Hardaway started strong yesterday, directing the Heat to five assists in the first five minutes. But he added just one more assist in his final 20 minutes. In Game 3, Hardaway, who is a free agent July 1 and thus could conceivably move elsewhere, sat the final 22:52.

Riley afterwards indicated he would sit and listen to what Hardaway has to say. “We’ll talk. I’ll talk to him. We’ll sit down and talk,” was Riley’s take on the matter.

Hardaway played 30 minutes in each of the first two games of the series, dropped to 18 for Game 3 and was back to 25 yesterday. He insisted he could have gone back in at some point in the fourth quarter if he had been called upon to do so by Riley. Knowing his tenuous status, Hardaway comes out and goes as hard as he can for as long as he can.

“I was out there trying to do my job and being aggressive,” Hardaway said. “We’ll see. all I can say is we’ll see. I’m not talking about the foot any more. Yeah, I could have come back, but I thought A.C. (Anthony Carter) was out there doing a beautiful job and he (Riley) thought sitting me out and letting him go and run the offense and get the team to another victory (was best). I was over there cheering and doing whatever it takes.”

And that just might be Hardaway’s job for the rest of the series.