Kathy Kmonicek/AP
Jeremy Lin stands to make more money in New York, but his basketball career would be better off in Houston.
You keep hearing about the boatloads of money that Jeremy Lin will make for the Knicks, from the jerseys he sells here all the way to the far reaches of the Asian market, as if we are somehow talking about a new basketball app and not a Harvard point guard.
But this decision shouldn’t be about that kind of business. It can only be about the basketball business. If it’s not, then the Knicks make it for all the wrong reasons, and waste valuable money, especially down the road, against the salary cap.
This isn’t to say that the Knicks shouldn’t match the back-loaded offer the Rockets have made for Lin. But if they do, then they have to believe that in a point guard league, that Lin can be one of the better point guards by the third year of this contract, when he starts making more money. Because if they don’t â€" and if he’s not â€" Knicks fans aren’t going to want to hear about how Lin helped them grow their brand in Taiwan.
The Knicks fans who fell in love with Lin and are still in love with the kid care only that he came along and helped save their season when he did, put a kind of life into the Garden that neither Amar’e Stoudemire nor Carmelo Anthony â€" two previous saviors â€" managed to do.
What they didn’t care about was what Linsanity did to Cablevision stock, and what a big week he gave Jimmy Dolan in the stock market.
People paying more money than ever for Knicks tickets, as a way of helping fund the renovation of the Garden, usually don’t rejoice when they find out the owner of the team has made a huge score.
Fans, especially ones beaten down the way Knicks fans have been, just want to win. This isn’t about the Garden still being the “mecca†of basketball after the decade it has just seen; this is about the power of the sport in New York. You see it and really hear it around here when pro basketball comes to life the way it did this week, with the Nets trading for Joe Johnson and signing Deron Williams and touching off more speculation about Dwight Howard.
You even see it with the Knicks, all the stories about a couple of legendary point guards like Steve Nash and Jason Kidd, whose combined age is 77.
Nets fans want their team to matter again for the first time since Kidd was with them, and was young. Knicks fans want to believe their team can somehow get back to the top tier of teams in their conference, and not see streamers falling out of the rafters of the “mecca†of basketball because the Knicks have won their first playoff game in 11 years.
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