NEW YORK (AP) – With two first-round picks in the NBA draft, Isiah Thomas has a chance to help the New York Knicks start building a promising future.

Forgive Thomas if he isn’t thinking that far ahead right now.

With Thomas seated next to him, Madison Square Garden chairman James Dolan delivered a warning Monday that he is prepared to make another coaching change next season if he doesn’t see improvement in the Knicks.

That means Thomas’ time on the Knicks’ bench could be just as short as Larry Brown’s was.

But Thomas, already the team’s president and general manager, said he wasn’t afraid of facing such pressure.

“I’d rather bet on myself,” Thomas said. “If my career is in the hands of somebody else … trust is not something that I have a lot of these days.

“It’s challenging. I don’t think there’s anybody else in the league, in sports probably, working under this situation. However, that’s how it is.”

Dolan fired Brown last Thursday after not getting assurances that the Hall of Fame coach would change the way he conducted himself off the court. Thomas will be judged on how the Knicks do on it – and it had better be a step up from this season’s 23-59 mark that tied the franchise record for losses.

“I’m saying this right with Isiah here. This is his team,” Dolan said. “He made this bed. There’s nobody better than him to make this thing go forward.

“But he has to do that and he has one year, one season to do that. At this time next year Isiah will be with us if we can all sit here and say that this team has made significant progress towards its goal of eventually becoming an NBA championship team. If we can’t say that, then Isiah will not be here.”

And Thomas wouldn’t just be replaced as coach. Dolan said that if he doesn’t see “evident progress, not just debatable progress,” then Thomas would lose all his roles within the Cablevision-owned organization.

“It’s his ship to steer,” Dolan said, “his ship to make go fast, his ship to crash. His ship.”

Earlier during a meeting with the team’s beat writers, Dolan acknowledged the Knicks “made a mistake” hiring Brown. And though reports surfaced in mid-May that he was trying to buy out the coach, Dolan said he hadn’t made up his mind to make a change until they met last Thursday.

But he said Brown wouldn’t acknowledge during that meeting that any of the issues Dolan brought up had even happened, so he had no choice but to make Thomas the Knicks’ fifth coach in the last three years – even though Brown had four years and $40 million left on the contract he signed last summer.

“I had 50 million reasons to stay with this,” Dolan said. “If I thought there was any chance that next season we could have the Larry Brown that everybody thought we were going to get, I mean I’d jump through hoops for that. But I don’t believe there was any opportunity to do that.”

Brown was frequently critical of the players in the media, and also spoke to reporters without the presence of a public relations official. Dolan said both go against his preferences and policies.

A bigger problem, Dolan said, was that Brown overstepped his role as coach by trying to get involved in personnel matters. He said there were at least two instances when the Knicks proposed a trade, only to be told, “That’s great, but I got a better offer from your coach.”

“We couldn’t get Larry to focus on his job,” Dolan said. “He wanted to focus on Isiah’s job.”

Dolan said he was particularly upset when Brown said after the season that five or six players needed to be waived for the team to avoid another poor result next season.

The matter of Brown’s payment now goes to NBA commissioner David Stern. The Knicks are refusing to pay the remainder, and a clause in Brown’s deal – one Dolan said he has never given to another employee – makes Stern the arbiter if there is any dispute.

Dolan said the Knicks will go along with whatever Stern rules. A message seeking comment was left with Brown’s agent, Joe Glass.

Thomas coached the Indiana Pacers for three seasons through 2002-03, going 131-115 and leading them to the playoffs in each season. But he said he wasn’t planning to return to coaching with the Knicks, claiming he was both heartbroken and mad that his longtime relationship with Brown had ended this way.

“I know from our standpoint, the Knicks’ standpoint, we needed Larry Brown,” Thomas said. “I wanted Larry to do a great job for us.”

AP-ES-06-27-06 0242EDT