AUBURN HILLS – Everyone waits for the explo sion, for the collision, for the inevitable coupling of fire and fury. It all makes Kenyon Martin laugh, to tell the truth. Everyone expects, at some point, that he and Rasheed Wallace are going to go all steel cage on each other.

Everyone figures it’s not a matter of if, but when. It makes Kenyon Martin laugh out loud, this silly talk.

“People keep wondering when me and Rasheed are gonna get into it,” Martin said yesterday morning, maybe nine hours before the Nets and the Pistons would square off in Game 1 of these Eastern Conference semifinals. “I don’t know why, to be honest. I’ve never had a problem with him and I don’t think he’s ever had one with me. I mean, we’re both good players who want the same things, that’s all.”

They are also players who have been known to simmer and boil, too. In Wallace’s boisterous career, he collects technical fouls the way kids stockpile baseball cards. He’s loud and he’s opinionated and you tend to know when he’s in the room.

And Martin’s the same way, always has been. He was raised just outside of Dallas, but he was born in Saginaw, Mich., and when he was looking for a basketball team to root for growing up, he bypassed the local Mavericks in favor of his roots. As soon as Martin saw some of what the Bad Boy Pistons were all about, he knew he’d found his basketball role models.

“I loved how Bill Laimbeer would just lay a guy out, then raise his hands and say, ‘What? What did I do?’ ” Martin said. “Me, I wasn’t quite as subtle. When I was hitting guys, they knew they’d been hit. And they knew who was doing the hitting.”

Martin laughed. There was a time when he was especially sensitive to that image, to the track record that insisted he was just as enamored of flagrant fouls as Wallace was with technicals. But you don’t see or hear that much anymore. When people talk about Martin, they talk temperament, not temper. They talk skills, not sociopathic behavior.

They talk about the one player who, if healthy, can truly keep Net fans thinking that the ending to this season will be different than the ones the past few years. His play against the Knicks was one way of keeping that conversation going. Sparked by Tim Thomas’ inane proclamations, Martin seemed intent on burying the Knicks all by himself. He’s capable of those surges.

“When Kenyon’s on top of his game,” Net coach Lawrence Frank said, “it’s scary to think what he’s capable of.”

The way Martin played against the Knicks, especially the games at Madison Square Garden, hearkened back to the game Martin turned in against Shaquille O’Neal and friends in Game 4 of the 2002 Finals. The Lakers were ready to complete their sweep, but first they had to watch Martin dominate the game. It was a pleasing contrast to the way Martin ended the 2003 Finals, in a blurry rush of missed shots and upset stomachs.

For Martin, getting back to playoff business was imperative. And getting an extensive break between series only helped strengthen his balky knee.

“I feel good,” he said. “I’m glad we had the time off. It allowed all of us to get healthy and back into pretty good shape. As you know, we’re the underdogs in this series, so we’ll be able to approach that from a different perspective, everyone calling us underdogs and all, we’ll see. Nobody’s talking too much right now. Who knows, maybe I’ll want to talk some tomorrow.”

With the Nets’ most important player, you just never know.