THE new-look Lakers made their only visit of the year to the Garden last night, offering locals an up-close look at how trading a center really can be a destructive idea. With Shaquille O’Neal having relocated from Los Angeles to Miami, the Lakers have become as average as just about every other team in the NBA.

Given the venom directed at Knick President Isiah Thomas over the last two weeks, you would have thought he had traded away O’Neal instead of Nazr Mohammed, a move that for some reason has caused the kind of backlash not seen in the NBA since the Shaq-Kobe breakup during the offseason.

While a rush to judgment is the prevailing approach when it comes to sports in this town, crucifying the deals Thomas pulled off before the trade deadline makes little sense given where the Knicks are now as opposed to 14 months ago, when Thomas inherited the job after the Garden became a mausoleum under Scott Layden.

The Knick president is a big guy, raised on tough streets in Chicago, so he needs no defense from me. But a true evaluation of the present can’t be made without comparison to the past.

Shandon Anderson, Howard Eisley, Clarence Weatherspoon, Keith Van Horn and Antonio McDyess. That was the team Thomas inherited along with a $95 million payroll. It was a team with little talent, no draft picks, no leaders, no future and contracts deemed un-trade-able.

I’ll raise my hand to suggest the Knicks who took the floor last night against the Lakers are better than they were a year ago and even two weeks ago, if for no other reason than the talent level has improved and they own a collection of draft picks with which to add more talent, including a coach named Larry Brown.

Let’s use a biblical analogy to track the progression: Weatherspoon begot Moochie Norris, who begot Maurice Taylor, a serviceable player, who becomes tradable next year because his contract expires in 2007.

McDyess, Eisley and Charlie Ward begot Stephon Marbury, the point guard everyone had been crying for around here since Doc Rivers left. Van Horn, who was making $14 million, begot Tim Thomas and Nazr Mohammed, who begot Malik Rose and two first-round draft picks from San Antonio. And let’s not forget the addition by subtraction in bringing in Jerome Williams and Jamal Crawford for Dikembe Mutombo and Othella Harrington.

Think about it. Mohammed, who few knew before he came to New York, was parlayed into Rose, a veteran presence that was sorely needed in the Knicks’ locker room, and two first-round draft picks. Rose is the kind of presence the Knicks sorely need in the locker room, a voice backed with two championship rings.

With Allan Houston injured and Marbury lacking the intangibles that make for a great leader, Rose can step into a void that must be filled before the Knicks can start to become a team. He’s not a bad player, either, as evidenced by his eight rebounds in nine minutes in the Knicks’ victory over the Pacers on Saturday night.

“People view talent in terms of what they see on the court,” Thomas said. “There’s another talent that happens on the bus ride, the plane ride, in the locker room and in the training room. When you put a person like Malik Rose in the mix, he’s that man of character that makes everybody act the right way. When you’ve got people like that in the locker room around your team, that’s special, and it doesn’t have anything to do with a point or a rebound.”