Holy Spumoli, what a mess. The Knicks have really screwed the pooch this time without any help from Zeke!
A lot of people are saying that the Knicks made the right decision to let Lin go. That is true I guess of the final decision they made, which was given that they had Jason Kidd and Raymond Felton under contract and Houston had backloaded Lin's offer in an inconvenient way, they chose to let Lin go.
However, the Knicks had to make a series of really stupid decisions to even get to that point.
First off, they didn't make any kind of offer to Lin on their own. They intentionally sent him out to test the market. During this process, They signed the wife-beating, drunk-driving, brick-laying geriatric Jason Kidd. They then signed the truly atrocious Raymond Felton.
Each of these decisions on their own and especially the three of them taken to together tell me that the Knicks were never very interested in bringing Lin back.
I mean Kidd & Felton? Really?
Kidd shot 36% from the floor last season and couldn't stay in front of a Galapagos tortoise on defense. Felton shot 40.7 percent last year and that is BASICALLY HIS CAREER AVERAGE SHOOTING PERCENTAGE!
Maybe there are some advanced metrics out there that would show Kidd & Felton to be awesome, but I don't think so. Lin might not be a great point guard, but he's better than those two put together (which isn't saying much).
I personally believe that Jeremy got D'Antoni'd by the same person who D'Antoni'd D'Antoni.
In 2012-13 it will be all Carmelo all the time.
If it weren't James Dolan we are talking about, the decision to not make an offer on their own is defensible. The CBA restricts what NY could offer Lin, relative to matching. But there was also no guarantee that a team would come in and offer Lin more than the max NY could offer.
ReplyDeletePlus, the moratorium on signing contracts meant NY had to wait. They simply chose to wait without setting the market (making an initial offer than Lin could not sign until July 11).
This is worth a read if you're interested in this aspect:
http://offthedribble.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/questions-abound-with-lin-in-the-balance/#more-21443
Of course, the guys they brought in to replace Lin are bums. So that's gotta suck for Knicks fans.