Lupica: If this leads to Paul, it's smart move - New York Daily News

Andrew Theodorakis, Ron Antonelli/New York Daily News

Letting go of Linsanity may not be so bad after all. Especially if the Knicks can find a way to land Chris Paul next year.

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The Knicks may still buy into the notion that Jeremy Lin is some kind of savior-in-waiting for them. But if they essentially buy Lin off the Rockets for the offer sheet Houston has offered him, maybe they are the ones who are a little bit Linsane. And if a deal that will pay Lin nearly max NBA money in a couple of years costs the Knicks any chance at Chris Paul when Paul becomes available as a free agent in a year, then they will be acting certifiable.

Look at it another way: Look at what Victor Cruz did for the Giants when he came out of nowhere last season when he was breaking the Giants’ single-season record for receiving yards and look at what Lin did for the Knicks, and tell me that it was really close. No matter how swept away everybody was by what Lin did in the month of February, starting with the day before the Super Bowl against the Nets.

KNICKS BRING BACK FELTON, MAY LET JEREMY GO

This doesn’t mean Lin isn’t a very nice, unselfish player and a nice young man with what is obviously a tremendous backstory just since he graduated Harvard. Maybe he can make the Knicks better next season than they were without him in the playoffs.

Or maybe a playoff series against the Miami Heat, which wasn’t very nice to him in the regular season, would have exposed Lin, and he would have turned the ball over too much, and the Rockets wouldn’t have come after him with a deal that doesn’t just pay him $25 million but nearly pays him $15 million in the third year of the deal. It would mean the Knicks, if they match, will have a small fortune tied up in four basketball players:

Carmelo.

Amar’e.

Tyson Chandler.

And . . . Jeremy Lin?

It was assumed all along that the Knicks would match the Rockets’ offer sheet, once they actually got the Rockets’ offer sheet, until the word began to get around on Saturday night that the Knicks were trading for Raymond Felton. Now, nobody ever discussed Felton as an instant global icon, but you may remember that the Knicks were going along very nicely â€" before the Carmelo Anthony trade â€" with Felton as the point guard.

But he did pretty well in Mike D’Antoni’s system, working it with Amar’e Stoudemire, before he was one of the Knicks who had to leave town to make room for Anthony. And suddenly on Saturday night, Knicks fans started to think that Jason Kidd and Raymond Felton was not such a terrible alternative to Kidd and Lin, and a whole heck of a lot cheaper. And might keep the Knicks in play for Paul when the time comes.

Understand: The Knicks may still want Lin. Or maybe they have taken a step back and taken a hard look at the salary-cap implications down the road of signing Lin to this particular deal. Maybe they have taken all the giddy emotion of Linsanity out of the equation and decided that the financials of the deal make no sense to them, no matter how big a story Lin became when he was like a shooting star across the city and the sport and, briefly, the whole sporting landscape in this country.