Jeremy Lin’s left knee has wounded the Knicks. Badly.
And not only for the obvious reasons. Yes, it would have been helpful if Lin could have been healthy for the playoffs, if he could have played against the Heat. Maybe the Knicks win an extra game with Lin in the lineup. Maybe the offense looks less sickly. Maybe without the grind of all those extra minutes on his busted-up body, Baron Davis’ right knee would have been less susceptible to calamitous blowout.
All of those are interesting questions, and all are mere trivia. Because Lin’s absence across the season’s final six weeks only slightly altered what might have been for the 2012 Knicks. But it might profoundly alter where the Knicks go in 2013 and beyond.
This is a team desperate for stability at the point-guard position, a traffic cop with the skill and savvy to direct the egos and ambitions of a high-salaried core. Can Lin be that? Maybe he can. Maybe he can’t. If nothing else, the last six weeks might have been able to better answer that fundamental question. Because right now, this is all the Knicks have to work on:
Maybe.
And maybe is a killer for this team, at this time in its history. They have to be right. If the Heat series proved anything, it’s that the Knicks can’t survive without a capable NBA point guard. Amar’e Stoudemire and Tyson Chandler both need the guiding hand of a playmaker, and Carmelo Anthony needs the firm voice of an empowered quarterback.
Steve Nash is the popular name, and why not? He’s a Hall of Famer. He has an apartment in SoHo. He would fit nicely alongside the Big Three, and his presence might attract others to take less money to play here. But unless Nash either has an overwhelming jones to ride the subway to work or harbors some unknown affinity for the Knicks, he can make more money elsewhere — starting in Phoenix, which will overpay to keep him — or find a team resting closer to the NBA’s firmament. Maybe a reunion with Mike D’Antoni would have been that X-factor. But D’Antoni was forced to walk the gangplank in March.
That brings us back to Lin, who electrified the franchise when he tumbled out of the sky in early February, who for a couple of weeks was the most popular athlete on the planet, and who then vanished into a rabbit hole. Even before his knee betrayed him, the NBA had started to catch up to him, and this is what we learned: he probably wasn’t going to be the greatest point guard in the game’s history, and he wasn’t a D-Leaguer.
He was somewhere in between.
But where in between?
That’s what cost the Knicks the most. Seeing Lin run the team during a playoff drive, and into the postseason, they would have had a much broader idea of who he is and what he can be. Now? It’s all guesswork and supposition. It’s not unlike what happened to the Mets with Ike Davis last year: they really needed a full year to determine if Davis was a stopgap or a cornerstone at first base. They guessed cornerstone. And at last glance he was hitting .179.
Maybe Davis still will justify the Mets’ faith. It is almost certain Lin is going to force the Knicks to make a similar decision based on an similarly sparse sample size, because they simply can’t have what they had at the beginning of the year with Toney Douglas, or at the end with the calcifying Davis/Mike Bibby tag team: non-competitiveness at the point.
Lin is the chalk pick. They can guarantee his presence, which is something they can’t do with Nash, and something they shouldn’t do with the pedestrian pool of point guards likely to be available. Is Lin the absolute best option? It’s impossible to know that, and that’s the problem. But the Knicks do know they can keep him, and they know what he’s capable of when he’s at his best. It isn’t an ideal place to be.
But, then, when in the last 39 years have the Knicks ever sniffed that idyllic address?
mike.vaccaro@nypost.com