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Maybe the first reaction will be anger, or sadness, or regret, because we were all there in those early hours of Jeremy Lin’s reign, when it seemed he was equal parts Joe Hardy and Roy Hobbs, when every night brought something new, when Knicks fans learned to fall in love with the sport — and their team — all over again.
Those feelings should pass, though, and quickly.
Because the Knicks did precisely what they should have done yesterday. They refused to be treated as an ATM machine by a basketball player who has started exactly 25 games in the NBA, and had somehow finagled an offer sheet from the Rockets good for $1 million for each of those games. Just because the Knicks can afford to write absurd checks doesn’t mean they have to. And doesn’t mean they should.
And doesn’t mean that Jeremy Lin — who outed himself as a clever manipulator of the system the past few weeks, not anything close to the pie-eyed innocent he portrayed himself during the teeth of Linsanity — is worth crazy, absurd, ridiculous money. At the end of the day, the Knicks made a basketball decision and not a marketing decision. Which is exactly the way it should be.
So Raymond Felton returns to the Knicks, and to the many Knicks fans who have pined for him ever since he was exiled to Denver in the Carmelo Anthony trade. Felton never has been better as a pro than he was as a Knick — certainly not last year in Portland, when he was chronically out of shape and too often looked disinterested.
Is the Felton/Jason Kidd combo a better option than Lin/Kidd? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. That always was one thing you knew the Knicks were going to have to ask themselves, because it was impossible for them to know. Lin missed the last six weeks of the season, and all five games against the Heat. They made their playoff push without him, played the entire playoffs without him.
We know the one time he played against the Heat, the last day before the All-Star break, Miami made him look like a JV player, made him look slow and small and incapable of keeping up with the one team you have to be able to match up with going forward. It would have been nice to see him play important games, but his knee wouldn’t allow it. So the Knicks had to ask themselves if they were really willing to guarantee $25 million to a player they weren’t sure — couldn’t possibly be sure — was remotely equal to the task of playing like the elite point guard he was going to be paid to be.
Had to decide if they were willing to pay him on spec.
Look, Lin may well turn out to be everything he teased he might be during those heady days of February, when he grabbed New York City by the lapels. The Rockets may well have out-maneuvered the Knicks here, gotten themselves a hell of a star — even if this was the same player they cut loose for nothing back in December.
He seems like a nice enough kid that you can root for that to happen for him.
But he also wasn’t near the Pollyanna he was perceived to be. On the one hand, he reportedly celebrated his original offer sheet from the Rockets by having dinner with Knicks assistant Ken Atkinson, the man he always credited with working with him so tirelessly, even before Linsanity hit. On the other, he also apparently shared with Houston the Knicks’ strategy of matching that original offer, which helped Houston decide to re-do the deal, and angered Knicks brass.
Did the kid do anything wrong? Not in the least. He made himself a few extra million dollars, and his economics professors at Harvard surely are applauding his savvy. Maybe his DNA is more suited to Houston than New York.
The Knicks? For years they’ve been unable to help themselves in moments like this, always wrote the check, worried about it later. They don’t write the check now, and maybe it means they’ll get to write an even bigger one for Chris Paul down the line. And even if they didn’t? For once they choose game over glitter. It was a brassy choice. And, it says here, the right one.