Look: For the record, I am NOT going to urge Adam Silver to commit fraud next Tuesday night in Chicago, when the NBA conducts its draft lottery.

(Not in so many words, anyway.)

That would be hard to justify. That would be a hard thing for a conscience to live with, especially one that endured 16 years of Catholic school — even if, by suggesting fraud, and by the NBA commissioner agreeing to commit fraud, it might well lead to the pages of this newspaper actually being filled, some May soon, with playoff basketball stories instead of updates about Jason Vargas’ hamstring and Clint Frazier’s ankle.

(Hey, a guy can dream.)

I am not going to urge the NBA to do everything in its power — and maybe a thing or three beyond its power — to see that Zion Williamson, who is only the most buzzed-about ballplayer in basketball since LeBron James, be directed toward the Knicks, toward Madison Square Garden, toward New York City, toward Madison Avenue.

Furthermore, I am not going to counsel Silver to consider all the dominoes that could well fall if the Knicks get the No. 1 pick next Tuesday, if they take Zion a month later, if they then have Zion as an asset to show off when — picking a random name out of a hat here — Kevin Durant conducts his Hamptons Retreat 2.0 some 10 days after that and considers where to play the rest of his prime.

Beyond that, I refuse to advocate for Silver to recall what it was like in New York City in the 1990s, when basketball ruled the day, when the Knicks owned the city, when as much of a baseball town as New York is, and was — and we are talking about some years in which the New York Yankees were your defending World Series champions — baseball season in New York did not officially begin until the day after the Knicks were eliminated.

No. I won’t do any of that.

That would be wrong.

I certainly won’t repeat one of the golden truths about pro basketball, even if it infuriates the nice people who live in the flyover states: The NBA is simply a better product when the Knicks are good. Period.

And I will happily guide the commissioner back to 1985, when the Knicks went 24-58, finished in last place in the Atlantic Division, and averaged 11,149 fans across 41 games inside 19,763-seat Madison Square Garden. Pro basketball was dead in New York. St. John’s averaged 7,000 more fans every time it played the Garden. The Knicks were a pitiable mess of a franchise (even worse than they are now, if that’s even fathomable). Nobody watched the games. Nobody listened to the games.

Nobody gave a damn.

And then, something funny happened.

The date we all point to is May 12, because that was the first-ever NBA lottery, held in the Starlight Room on the 18th floor of the Waldorf-Astoria. Dave DeBusschere, then the Knicks’ GM, long told how he did his part to persuade fate to smile on the Knicks that day: a horseshoe borrowed from harness racing champ On the Road Again, coupled with some prayers from morning Mass at St. Joseph’s in Garden City “that may have been a little selfish.”

(Although it would be unlikely that even the pope himself would pray for equal luck for everyone in a lottery if His Holiness had a dog in the hunt)

Of course, there were other things that might’ve been helpful. Then-Hawks GM Stan Kasten told Sports Illustrated a few years ago that he’d been hearing for months that the Knicks would be taken care of. Later, when it was pointed out to MSG president Jack Krumpe that the auditing firm Ernst & Whinney, which oversaw the lottery, also happened to have Gulf + Western (which owned the Knicks at the time) as a client, Krupe said:

“Hey, I told them how to fix it 60 days ago. You call up Ernst & Whinney and you say, ‘If we don’t get Ewing, you’re fired.’ ”

(A moment of silence, please, to remember a time when sports executives weren’t terrified to give you a money quote like THAT on the record.)

And, of course, there was the Frozen Envelope Theory.

It was just one of many postulates that would crop up over the years, after the Knicks won the lottery and Patrick Ewing became a Hall of Famer and the Knicks a playoff staple who, if they never won a title, filled the Garden every night and gave the NBA a couple of fierce, classic rivalries around which to build (the Bulls first, later the Pacers and Heat) and helped turn MSG Network into a powerhouse.

So, the notion went: Someone had kept the Knicks’ envelope (which would be swirled about in a huge plastic bowl) in a freezer for hours so Stern would instantly know which one had their logo inside. Or, Stern was wearing infrared eyeglasses, allowing him to spot a red mark invisible to the rest of the world. Or, he spotted the envelope with the bent corner (and, well, if you look at the video, the fourth envelope thrown into the bowl does “accidentally” crash against the side of the bowl, and the winning envelope Stern pulls does seem to have a bent corner) …

Stern has answered questions about this very differently over the years, depending on his mood, from glib (“We have the loot from the Brink’s Robbery and the Great Train Robbery as well!”) to indifferent (“If people want to say it was fixed, that’s fine, just spell our name right”) to furious (when Jim Rome asked him about it point blank, Stern replied, “Shame on you for asking. Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”)

I asked Patrick Ewing himself about all of this last fall and he laughed.

“I’ll believe anything,” he said. “But it seemed to work out fine for everyone, right? I was a Knick. New York fell back in love with the Knicks. And we never actually won a title so nobody ever got all that mad thinking it was fixed for us.”

So: No. I will not ask Adam Silver to plot out a 15-year script for himself in which every time a picture of Zion wearing No. 1 for the Knicks shows up on a television screen, he is inundated with whispers and innuendo. I will not mention that, even if the Ewing envelope was frozen, bent, and covered in infrared targets and Stickum and peanut butter and jelly, the celestial judges would seem to have spoken, since in the 34 years since the Knicks have never — not once — not once! — moved up even one slot in any lottery they’ve participated in.

(I will also conveniently forget to mention that not everybody believes Zion is the greatest basketball invention since the shot clock, or that the last time everyone talked this much about fixing the draft was 2015, when the Knicks had a 19% shot at No. 1 [it’s only 14% this time] and that the player that seemed to be the apple of their eye that year was another Duke star named Jahlil Okafor, and that, well, probably wouldn’t have worked out so well.)

Nope. I can’t do it. I can’t have Adam Silver 20, 30 years from now ask an interrogator, as Stern has so many times, “You want to know if I committed a felony?” (Even if, since Silver hadn’t actually attended a lottery since 2014, he would have an outstanding supply of plausible deniability). That would be wrong. That would be unethical. That would be improper.

Still … if he wanted to do all of that on his own …