What does the future look like for the New York Knicks?

The cloud of mystery hovering over the 2017 NBA Draft for the New York Knicks existed long before Phil Jackson, the man paid $12 million per year to bring clarity to the franchise, turned a relationship with the team’s most valuable player into collateral damage in his effort to run off the team’s brightest star.

But even before the Knicks took Frank Ntilikina with the eighth overall pick, Jackson illustrated precisely how tangled the chronology of the roster’s plan had become during his three-year tenure with an answer during an interview on MSG the night before the draft about why he’d consider trading Kristaps Porzingis, 21-year-old possessor of gifts seldom seen before and seemingly custom-built for the direction of the NBA as a whole.

“Future,” Jackson said.

Jackson expanded on that, speaking to gathered media at the Knicks training facility Thursday night shortly after selecting Ntilikina.

“We’ve started, really with some young players. A number of players we had last year, the year before. And this year, we’ve got a couple more picks coming. And the reality is we have to mold a team together.”

That isn’t dramatically different from what Jackson’s been preaching since arriving in New York. But consider what that pursuit has meant in the Jackson tenure already, several versions of a better Knicks world supposedly ahead, built partially on the ashes of a just-discarded plan.

There was the major rebuild around Carmelo Anthony, one that led to a long-term deal with Anthony and a plea for patience, the Knicks without a first round pick in 2014 due to the deal that gave them Anthony. A lost season followed, but an acceptable one to anyone familiar with the time window required to properly build an NBA team.

And the reward for all the losing, a spring filled with Knicks fans halfheartedly cheering at The Garden as the franchise set a record for losses — the team selected Kristaps Porzingis with the lone lottery pick they’d enjoy over a three-year period between 2014 and 2016.

Suddenly, the true nature of the project, all the waiting, appeared to dawn on everyone involved. For Anthony, it was immediate — the displeasure over the pick, then a gradual coming to terms with it, and building a genuinely strong relationship with Porzingis.

For Jackson, the patience ran out a year later, when he traded a good contract in Robin Lopez for a difficult-to-fit part in Derrick Rose and the right to sign Joakim Noah to an awful contract as a Lopez replacement.

But from Jackson’s perspective, past 70 last summer, with this likely to be his last job, it was understandable. It also underscored that the Knicks, with their most valuable player still shy of legal drinking age, had no business employing a team president with a win-now mentality.

Jackson smiled wryly, answering a question about Ntilikina’s age from a reporter with a simple, “We’re all young.” But surely Jackson realizes time is short — in life, in his contract, in the patience that isn’t typically displayed by Knicks owner James Dolan.

And the psychology for followers of the team suffered all the more by these rapid turns — to be a contender, a long-term rebuild, and a self-styled super team in rapid succession proved difficult to reconcile for both team and fans alike.

So when the 2016-17 Knicks self-destructed the way the law of averages suggested they would — Rose ineffective, Noah hurt was the likeliest bet on the board — Jackson didn’t really have a narrative. He had a talented veteran in Anthony. He had a fantastic young prospect already playing at a high level in Porzingis. Deal Anthony and build around Porzingis, and Jackson could at least credibly stake his reputation as an executive on the foundation, and hope that all which came after served as a final validation for a man who, let’s face it, already has more rings to validate him than fingers.

But the decision to compound his destructive public attack on Anthony and repeatedly — which has destroyed any remaining cache the team had with free agents — to do the same to Porzingis not only reinforced who is really at fault in the Anthony contratemps, but it removes the last plausible parachute of the Phil Jackson era — Porzingis succeeds, playing with Ntilikina and whoever else he can cobble together around them.

Jackson returned to the origin story again Thursday night, however, invoking the last Knicks championship teams, the ones he played on, the platonic ideal of basketball for the city, in part because it truly was glorious, in part because no championship paradigm has followed.

“In my own experience, in the Knicks’ experience when they had success in the late 60s, early 70s, when they had success, five or six players had a few years of experience together in the NBA… I think we have to start grooming our own kids.”

If anything, it is the loss of this story that hurts Jackson and the Knicks with future free agents as much as his battles with Anthony and Porzingis, particularly if the latter relationship proves irreconcilible. When players meet with prospective teams, assuming the money is close, they need to see the path, the route from holding a jersey in front of them while the cameras snap to collapsing on the wooden floor in June as confetti rains down.

But what is that path for the Knicks? And why should anyone — Porzingis, Anthony, Ntilikina or the players who could take them from this endless basketball cul-de-sac into progress at last — think that Jackson will not only make such a plan, but stick with it, and be present when it pans out?

In Ntilikina, the Knicks managed to land a player whose upside coincides with the direction of the league in precisely the ways Porzingis does. Oversized, versatile, with length that should project for the Knicks at both ends of the floor, the defensive presence described by Jackson as “a big part of it for us” as the reason to select Ntilikina.

And yet: Jackson also acknowledged that Ntikilina’s selection did not preclude a reunion with free agent Derrick Rose, though the Knicks surely cannot be hoping Rose will be the example they want Ntilikina to follow on the court. Porzingis, for all the ways in which he exceeded immediate expectations his rookie year, averaged 28.4 minutes per game and started all 72 games in which he played. Jackson made that sound more aspirational than an expectation for Ntilikina, which is both reasonable and problematic given the current team needs.

“Both,” Jackson said, when asked whether the pick was for now or later. “I want a productive player in this draft. I want someone who can get out on the floor and help us out. It’s too important a selection in the lottery not to be someone who can’t be out there, playing for your team. We’ll take whatever his advancement is as a player. If he’s a guy who comes off the bench, who learns how to play the game, that’s fine.”

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That places Ntilikina’s timetable for stardom right around the time Kristaps Porzingis is eligible to leave town. It comes after Anthony’s contract is up, and Jackson’s too, for that matter, both signed through 2019, Anthony with a no-trade clause he appears perfectly comfortable using to stay in New York.

So what exactly does “Future” mean with the New York Knicks?

It’s less clear than ever.