One week into an already stressful season, the Knicks do not have a center, a defensive beacon in the N.B.A. storm. There is no short or complete answer to the loss of Tyson Chandler with a nondisplaced fracture of the right fibula. But there will be suggestions on how to cobble together a plan to survive for the next four to six weeks. And here is one:
N.B.A.

Get the agent Arn Tellem on the phone and see how quickly they can get Jason Collins to New York.

Collins has been home in Los Angeles, working out and waiting for the inevitable injury that would send a front-line player to the injured list and get him back into the league for at least part of a 13th season. Chandler was the first and will not be the last.

Reluctant to be quoted on a touchy subject, many N.B.A. insiders have insisted that Collins’s exclusion has had nothing to do with the announcement last spring that he is gay. It has been, they said, more about his age, limited abilities and in some cases about luxury tax complications related to the salary cap.

They are right that Collins, 35 next month, is no compelling asset for any team that does not have wreckage. But the Knicks are suddenly that desperate team, terrified of falling behind in the race for playoff seeding in a season that could determine Carmelo Anthony’s future with the franchise.

In training camp, Coach Mike Woodson said that the Knicks had considered signing Collins. Over the next six weeks, Woodson is going to need all the height, experience and big man savvy he can get. Jeremy Tyler, who was cut at the end of training camp, could be re-signed. But he is young and unproven. If Collins can provide 10 to 15 minutes a game of smart, positional defense — and he can — he is worth signing too.

At the very least, he would bring more value to the Knicks than Chris Smith, brother of J. R., and one or two others on their very flawed roster put together by Glen Grunwald, the former general manager who was removed the week before training camp.

What owner makes a move like that? Rational critics could not help but wonder while trying to read the mind of the Madison Square Garden strongman James L. Dolan. Behold the prescience and basketball savvy of Dolan as the Knicks — 1-3 after surrendering 64 first-half points and losing at home to Michael Jordan’s Charlotte Bobcats Tuesday night — devolve before our eyes.

Play along with the gag here as we claim that Dolan recognized that Grunwald, the architect of a 54-victory team last season, did a lousy job of addressing the issues and needs of the Knicks coming off their deflating and revealing second-round defeat to the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference semifinals last season. (To the contrary, he told Grunwald’s replacement, Steve Mills, that he was handed championship material.)

Remember how the Knicks were hammered on the boards by the bigger and more athletic Pacers, out-rebounded by an average of almost nine per game over a six-game series? Explain, then, how Grunwald’s major off-season acquisition came to be Andrea Bargnani, a jump-shooting 7-footer whose reputation for not rebounding or playing with aggression was known to most N.B.A. fans in North America and millions more in Europe and Asia.

Chandler, who turned 31 last month and has been at it professionally since he was a teenager, took a beating at center last season and finished it looking more like 41 against Indiana’s Roy Hibbert. Forget a viable alternative for this season in the event Chandler got hurt, as he did Tuesday night when he collided with Charlotte’s Kemba Walker. Grunwald failed to provide even an actual center (unless you count Cole Aldrich, inactive against Charlotte).

For a team that was overloaded last season with basketball geriatrics (Rasheed Wallace, Marcus Camby) whose health predictably betrayed them, Grunwald re-signed Kenyon Martin, whose 35-year-old and battle-worn body was breaking down by last spring’s playoffs after only 18 regular-season games.

Martin now seems to be available to help out at center — a position for which he is undersized — only for limited minutes and perhaps not every night. That further handicaps a roster hamstrung by the increasingly dysfunctional Amar’e Stoudemire, a defensive liability at any position.

Collins would be no more than a Band-Aid, but he has been running hills in Los Angeles, lifting weights, doing yoga. “A lot of eyeballs on me,” he said in an interview last month, imagining being back in the sport.

Los Angeles Clippers Coach Doc Rivers, who had Collins last season in Boston, told a story about how he was critical of the veteran during a game for giving up a dunk. Kevin Garnett piped up: “Are you kidding, Doc? He ain’t ever in the wrong spot.”

“As it turned out, they were right — he was in the right spot, as usual,” Rivers said.

With the Knicks in a spot, does this franchise have the kind of enlightened cultural environment to handle the attention Collins would bring and the sensitivity he would deserve? This, of course, was the group that followed Martin when he suggested to teammates that they dress all in black for a presumed playoff burial of the Celtics last April, not long after Boston was traumatized by the marathon bombings.

Collins in this mix might sound like a stretch, but let’s be positive. While the Garden’s City Dancers are being rebranded (official explanation for the disappearance of their routines), here is an unexpected opportunity to rebrand the Knicks as a franchise with a social conscience and bring in a player they could use to boot.

The way this season has begun, what do they have to lose? Anyway, in the end, it’ll all be Grunwald’s fault.