Los Angeles ? Isiah Thomas finally admitted Wednesday night what has been painfully obvious since the Knicks took the court for their season opener just over two weeks ago. In just under two years of rebuilding the Knicks from top to bottom, he at last brought himself to concede that he has put together a flawed team.

The only conclusion we can draw from that startling bit of candor is that Larry Brown has been worth every penny so far.

It took Brown all of four games to begin publicly questioning Thomas’ roster. But when given the opportunity to come back at his coach, the team president didn’t resort to those old tactics from Chicago’s West Side. He didn’t come back swinging when he had been backed into a corner.

Far from it. Addressing the New York media a half-hour before Wednesday night’s game against the Lakers, it was as if someone had put a dose of truth serum in Thomas’ bottled water. That’s the effect Brown has had on his boss, and it’s got to be a great sign for all Knicks fans.

“We, and I, understand, it’s not a perfect roster,” Thomas said, standing outside the Knicks locker room at Staples Center.

It’s far from the perfect roster, as the sub-.500 record suggests. Thomas tried to make a case that the Knicks are making progress. Baby steps, maybe. He said he was looking at the Knicks’ defensive effort. OK, but when your last two full-time head coaches were Lenny Wilkens and Don Chaney, that shouldn’t be very hard to accomplish.

If there’s been even slight progress at the defensive end, there needs to be even more improvement with this mish-mosh of a roster. At long last, Thomas agreed with that assessment.

“Every roster is flawed, unless you win the NBA championship,” he said. “The team that wins the NBA championship has the perfect roster. And the other 29 teams – guess what – they got problems. That’s how it goes.”

The rebuilding is going very slowly. The problem isn’t that the Knicks have a $120 million payroll. It’s that Thomas has overhauled the team and still does not have a legitimate superstar. Until he figures out how to get one of those, he’s just spinning his wheels.

“You’re not going to do that in 24 months, coming from where we came from,” he said about building a winner. “Now will everybody here make the ride and ride on the float one day if we ever get there? Probably not. But their job is to work to try to do that. And if they can’t do that, my job is to try to get somebody who can.”

From all the moves Thomas has made, you have to seriously doubt if he’s up to the task. But in the meantime, it is Brown’s job to try to make it work. It’s fine for him to think that he’s got flawed players and a dysfunctional team. That’s not news.

But there’s a reason Brown was hired and is making $10 million a year. Imperfect roster or not, he’s got to find a way to get this franchise back to respectability. Sometimes, coaches don’t figure it out, even if they’re highly paid and candidates for the Hall of Fame. Just ask Laker fans who still don’t know how Phil Jackson allowed a divorce to occur between Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant.

Brown’s considerable resume suggests that whether Quentin Richardson and Jamal Crawford are playing out of position or not, he has the smarts to put them in position where they will succeed. If he can’t, fine. But maybe he could have waited more than four games to come to that determination.