Baseball’s Opening Day is fast approaching, and the Knicks are going to be free pretty soon to take in as many Yankees and Mets games as they care to watch. So let us put Tom Thibodeau’s two seasons in New York in a balls-and-strikes context.

Last year, Thibs was a league MVP who hit .325 with 37 homers and 118 RBI.

This year, Thibs has been a banged-up mess at the plate, batting a Charmin-soft .269 with 14 homers and an endless parade of runners left on base.

Just as good players have bad seasons, good coaches have bad seasons too. As his team is heavily favored to fall short of the play-in tournament — the lowest of low NBA bars — Thibodeau has to accept his share of the blame. And his most damaging failure was his inability to do what he consistently did last year:

Get the best out of Julius Randle.

Soon enough, the Knicks’ blame game should be fun to follow while 10 better Eastern Conference teams take their postseason chances. Nobody knows if Leon Rose, the agent-turned-executive, has any idea what he’s looking at, or if he’d be better off finding work as a mime. Nobody knows if Randle has compromised his trade value with substandard play and get-me-outta-here body language to the extent that his team will have a rough time moving him this summer for a reasonable return.

Yes, Randle and Rose will take the most heat, and rightfully so. Rose for making the moves that did nothing to help last year’s No. 4 seed in the East, and Randle for signing the big contract after winning the Most Improved Player Award and second-team All-NBA honors, and then often acting like he wanted to be anywhere else on game nights other than Madison Square Garden.

But Thibodeau, the league’s Coach of the Year in 2020-21, has to be right behind them on that line in 2022. Though he will never be forgotten for the gift he gave the city in his first go-around in his dream job, and though he should never again be asked to pay for a meal or a drink in the tristate area, Thibs didn’t deliver a worthy sequel in Year 2, in part because he couldn’t stop his best player from dragging everyone and everything down.

So before Wednesday night’s meeting with Charlotte in the Garden, I effectively asked Thibodeau why he felt last season’s clear love affair between Randle and the city appeared headed to divorce court so damn quickly.

“Every year is different,” he responded. “You’re faced with new and different challenges. This year didn’t go like last year did. Hopefully we can finish up like we did last year. Things change all the time and … I think it goes with the turf. You’re going to get a lot of credit, you’re going to get a lot of blame. That’s the way it works here, so just stay focused, come in the next day and just keep working. Just keep working.”

Thibodeau didn’t sound like he was talking to reporters gathered in the Garden interview room; it sounded like he was talking directly to Randle, who was not present.

Does Thibodeau say these things to Randle behind closed doors? Did he privately take him head-on after the star player chastised the fans and showed a lack of interest in the team and a lack of enthusiasm for his teammates’ successes?

I asked the coach a follow-up question about buttons, the kind that coaches are hired to push. Thibodeau pushed the right ones with Randle last year, and I wondered if he had struggled to find those this year.

“It’s not just one player,” he responded. “It’s your entire team. How do you bring the best out of your group. Right now, I want the focus to be on, OK, the team’s playing really good, playing winning basketball, and that’s where I want it to be. … Once the season’s over, we’ll dig into everything. We’ll look at the things we did well, the things we didn’t do as well as we would like, and then we’ll try to make the improvements over the course of the summer.”

And, yes, even before the four-game winning streak, Thibodeau had absolutely earned the right over the summer to fix what is broken. The guy is still one of the better coaches in the league, and still the Knicks’ best asset (with RJ Barrett closing hard). Unlike Randle, Thibodeau also wants to remain employed in New York in the worst way.

“This is the best place in the league to play,” he said, “and look, I’ve been just about every place. I’m speaking from experience. This place is special.”

Only it wasn’t special this season, not like it was last season. Thibodeau never connected with Randle, never inspired him to lead, or to play team-first ball, or to honor the terms of his $117 million extension.

That wasn’t just Randle’s fault. That was the coach’s fault, too.