1. Let’s start with the basketball standpoint. Lin was the best point guard option available. Felton, by all accounts, is overweight and coming off the worst season of his career. Kidd, or the shell that’s left of him, is 39, (though he apparently still has the party habits of someone 20 years his junior). Pablo Prigioni has even less NBA experience than Lin. Are there arguments that Lin isn’t the best of the group? Sure. But then again, this wasn’t a money decision.
2. Nope. This wasn’t about money. This was about loyalty. Jim Dolan gave Jeremy Lin his chance, and Lin stabbed him in the back. And by “giving a chance,” I mean signing the dotted line below Lin’s minimum NBA pay check, and by “stabbing him in the back,” I mean shopping around for a contract because Dolan and the rest of the knuckleheads in the front office told him to. How dare Lin accept a contract for more money to become a millionaire when he made $600 million for Cablevision and single-handedly ended the Time Warner Cable dispute? Seriously, if anyone handed you $5 million dollars, would you *ever* turn that down? Where was it written in stone that Lin had to come back to New York?
3. Yes, Melo, the contract was “ridiculous.” But I’m not talking about Lin’s, I’m talking about yours. At least Lin looks for his teammates on offense and attempts to play defense. Oh, and JR Smith – jealous much? Just because you negotiated a crappy contract doesn’t mean that Lin had to. Outside of Chandler, Novak and Shumpert, is there anyone likeable on this team?
4. Did the Knicks read the new CBA? Shouldn’t they have known about the possibility of the poison pill? Shouldn’t they have foreseen that other teams had access to the Internet and could Google the 2015 Knicks payroll? Someone explain to me why the Knicks would let Lin set his market value knowing they were going to get screwed in 2015. And by the way, were the Knicks really going to get screwed in 2015? There were about 15 different ways around it. Didn’t Grunwald know about the stretch provision or that expiring contracts are extremely valuable in the new CBA? Or that there were 3 other major contracts that could be valuable trade pieces?
5. The Knicks once gave Shandon Anderson a 6-year, $41 million contract. Shandon Anderson! Shandon-freakin-Anderson! To say nothing of Howard Eisley. Or Vin Baker. Or Eddie Curry. Or Steve Francis. Or Stephon Marbury. The list goes on. If you’re of the mind that the Knicks made a good move by exercising fiscal responsibility, *this* is the time they chose to exercise it? Relative to his talent, Lin doesn’t deserve that contract. But Lin is not every other player in the NBA. The contract Houston offered didn’t operate in a vacuum. They took into account the marketing possibilities and global interest. The Knicks mishandled from a PR, monetary and basketball standpoint. A player like Lin comes along once in a lifetime. It was dropped from the basketball gods on the Knicks lap, yet they still managed to screw it up. At least they managed to get a first round pick out of this. What’s that? They let him walk for nothing? The one player who got Knicks fans to care about the team for the first time in a decade and you let him leave… for nothing? Oh. What else is there to say? Typical Knicks. Typical Dolan.