Before you write any piece about the New York Knicks, it’s a good idea to lay the blame squarely on the shoulders of James Dolan. From top to bottom, the Knicks are not the most well-run organization in the league. That we can all admit. That said, the latest crisis isn’t directly the result of his mismanagement. As soon as Tyson Chandler got hurt, the whole thing fell apart. Few NBA teams can survive the loss of their most valuable player.

Carmelo Anthony is their leading scorer, but the Knicks have managed without him before. In the regular season, it’s fairly easy to redistribute field goal attempts and stay afloat for a few weeks when a volume scorer goes down. Linsanity was the ultimate proof of that. The NBA is like the NFL -- people focus too much on the guy with the ball in his hands. As the Knicks are finding out, the irreplaceable guy was the seven-footer anchoring the defense and finishing on the pick-and-roll.

There are not many players in the NBA who can do what Chandler does. At 7’1, 235 with a 7’2 wingspan, he is a physical marvel. When he’s healthy, he’s usually the tallest and the most athletic player on the floor. He has the strength to defend the post without a double team, the quickness to cut off dribble penetration and the length to play above the rim. There’s a reason he went No. 2 overall at the age of 18, even without much discernible basketball skill.

Over the last 13 years, he slowly turned himself into an effective two-way player. While he will never be a featured scorer, he’s very efficient on offense: in the last three seasons, he shot 66 percent, 68 percent and 64 percent from the field. He’s got the hands and leaping ability to catch alley-oops and he can knock down free throws, shooting 69% from the line in 2013. He’s the rare big man who knows how to play -- where to position himself and how to create space by cutting.

A big man with Chandler’s skill-set makes everyone on the floor better. His defensive impact is obvious -- it’s much easier to play poor defenders when you have a Defensive Player of the Year as the second-line of defense. On the offensive end, the pick-and-roll with Chandler creates ball movement. The defense has to react to his cut to the rim, which creates a gap for one of the perimeter players. From there, you rotate the ball to an open shot, preferably a corner 3.

There’s a reason the Knicks and the Mavs liked to start the game by throwing lobs to Tyson Chandler. It’s a reminder: if the defense doesn’t shade over, they can do that all night. The four-out offense allows Chandler to play in space just as much as Carmelo. When there’s more space on the floor, there are fewer people in the way of the lob at the rim. It’s an opening move: there are ways to defend it, but that leaves the defense open to counter measures.

Chandler is the kind of big man who can turn around a franchise. If that seems far-fetched for a guy who averages 10 points a game, look at the Dallas Mavericks. In the four years before Chandler got there, the Mavs won a grand total of one playoff series. That had nothing to do with Dirk Nowitzki either -- he was pretty much the same player he was in 2008 as he was in 2011. He added a post-game after the Golden State loss; after that, he could score at will.

Nevertheless, just like in New York, as soon as Chandler left Dallas, things crumbled quickly. A year after they won it all, the Mavs got the No. 8 seed and were swept out of the first round. Two years later, they missed the playoffs entirely. Dallas is only now starting to recover from that decision, with the signing of Monta Ellis adding a new element to their offense. The real irony is that the one thing their current roster is missing is a dynamic two-way center.

There were a lot of similarities between the 2011 Mavs and the 2013 Knicks, a point Chandler and Jason Kidd made many times. There was, however, one overriding difference -- in the playoffs, Dallas had Dirk defend quality 4’s, something New York was unwilling to do with Carmelo. In 2011, Dirk matched up with LaMarcus Aldridge and Pau Gasol. In contrast, the Knicks did not want Carmelo banging with a guy like David West for seven games.

For many Knicks fans, that’s where they went wrong in 2013 -- not going with the small-ball line-ups that got them to the second round in the first place. Knicks management, though, learned the opposite lesson -- if they were going to beat a team like the Pacers, they would need a second big man to match up with the likes of West and Roy Hibbert. At the same time, he also had to stretch the floor in order to maintain their offensive spacing. Thus, Andrea Bargnani.

There is a certain logic to the moves they made in the offseason, although it may not hold up to much scrutiny. The presence of Bargnani isn’t going to move the needle much in a hypothetical playoff match-up with the Miami Heat. In the regular season, bad teams have an easier chance of matching up against Bargnani at the four than Carmelo. That’s the trade-off with one-dimensional players: improve one facet of the line-up and subtract from 2-3 others.

Either way, it becomes a moot point if Chandler misses too much time. Even in the East, if the Knicks have another 3-7 stretch over the next few weeks, they will be digging themselves out of an awfully large hole. They might want to try Cole Aldrich: he’s 26 and he has the size (6’11 250) of a center picked in the lottery. Last season, in 15 games with the Sacramento Kings, he had a 15.7 PER. He’s still young enough to turn his career around.