Jeremy Lin

[STAT1]

@STAT1

All this talk about the time period of what happened doesn't matter that much.

Only reason I brought it up was to correct our friend here who seems to have his timelines in the wrong order. I really don't care how things went down, bottomline is Lin signed for the most money he could get in this deal & the Knicks decided to go in another direction. Lin made the choice to sign that offer sheet, he wasn't pushed to sign it by anything the Knicks did. To put it out there like that is a little ridiculous if you ask me.

The bottom line is, you're saying that Lin got greedy and signed onto Houston for a higher paycheck. That's not true. If Lin was really greedy for more money, he would have settled for smaller paycheck in NY and made 10 times more money off of endorsements in NYC.

He even says in the most recent interview that he's sick of people assuming he's in it just for the money. And he says he had a chance to sign for a crapton of endorsements but only signed 3.

First off, I never said Lin was greedy. I said he made the best business decision for himself & his family & I respect that. Anyone of us would have done the same. I've also said repeatedly on these forums that I think Lin made the wrong choice & he could have easily made more money if he had stayed in NY on endorsement deals. Fine, then so maybe it wasn't just about the money with Lin. OK. Maybe he just didn't want to be here anymore? Who knows what's in the mind of a professional athlete, but I don't respect him making the team who gave him his big break out to be the villains that drove him away. That's exactly what his comments are implying to me. They strike me as a guy who's grown too big for his own britches & already considers himself to be an established star after 25 games in the NBA. I always pegged Lin to be a humble guy, but that type of stuff is primadonna stuff. I would expect guys like Melo or STAT to make a comment like that, not Lin of all people. Pretty surprised & disappointed that he would even go down that road. I would have respected him a lot more had he simply thanked the Knicks for giving him a shot & left it at that.

[BillyHoyle]

Why would a billionaire who has spent so many wasted millions on guys like Jared Jeffries, Jerome James, Eddy Curry, Larry Brown, Jalen Rose & Steve Francis blink an eye over saving money? Doesn't make a bit of sense to me. I read this situation as clearly Dolan's ego taking precedence over business. We've seen this pattern of behavior before (Camby, Spree, Isiah), Dolan is know for this.

Here is how I have come to understand the situation:

For all the guys you've just cited where the Knicks have overpaid, the FO was trying to turn a bad/mediocre team into a winning team. There is a huge difference in the profit of MSG when the games are sold out vs when they aren't (also, they can charge more money for a good team). So, it is in Dolan's best interest to overspend if it means he is turning a bad team into a good one.

With the Knicks roster as currently structured, we know they are likely to be a 4-8 seed in the playoffs, even without Lin. This is good enough to justify ticket price raises and will keep the stands filled. The New York media market is large enough that it does not rely on the asian fans/ad revenue brought in by Lin, since the space will sell to another company. So, by matching Lin's offer, you're putting the Knicks on the books for 70 million over 3 years with little gain in ticket or ad sales. Yes, it is possble to trade him before the third year, but once Dolan were to match that offer, from a strictly business standpoint Lin becomes a large liability.

So that is why I think he would make the ridiculous offers to guys like jeffries/jerome james when the Knicks were bad, but is more reluctant now. Also, you make the point about Dolan taking things personally in the past/not operating on logic. Yes, this is a good point, but I do want to make the point that there are more people than just Dolan in the decision process. Saving the money on Lin does not just benefit Dolan, as some of it could be spread around to people in the FO in their next contract or bonuses.

Again, maybe I am giving Dolan too much credit, but the people i see playing up the "betrayal" storyline (Stephen A, Isola) are the same people who benefit from people believing that the original offer was agreed upon, since they were the ones who reported it.

[STAT1]

Here is how I have come to understand the situation:

For all the guys you've just cited where the Knicks have overpaid, the FO was trying to turn a bad/mediocre team into a winning team. There is a huge difference in the profit of MSG when the games are sold out vs when they aren't (also, they can charge more money for a good team). So, it is in Dolan's best interest to overspend if it means he is turning a bad team into a good one.

With the Knicks roster as currently structured, we know they are likely to be a 4-8 seed in the playoffs, even without Lin. This is good enough to justify ticket price raises and will keep the stands filled. The New York media market is large enough that it does not rely on the asian fans/ad revenue brought in by Lin, since the space will sell to another company. So, by matching Lin's offer, you're putting the Knicks on the books for 70 million over 3 years with little gain in ticket or ad sales. Yes, it is possble to trade him before the third year, but once Dolan were to match that offer, from a strictly business standpoint Lin becomes a large liability.

So that is why I think he would make the ridiculous offers to guys like jeffries/jerome james when the Knicks were bad, but is more reluctant now. Also, you make the point about Dolan taking things personally in the past/not operating on logic. Yes, this is a good point, but I do want to make the point that there are more people than just Dolan in the decision process. Saving the money on Lin does not just benefit Dolan, as some of it could be spread around to people in the FO in their next contract or bonuses.

Again, maybe I am giving Dolan too much credit, but the people i see playing up the "betrayal" storyline (Stephen A, Isola) are the same people who benefit from people believing that the original offer was agreed upon, since they were the ones who reported it.

I think Cablevision stood to gain a ton more money had they simply matched the offer than they would have had to spend on the luxury tax easily. If you don't believe me, just consider the money they made in profit when stock prices spiked during Linsanity, the new deal with Time Warner that it was directly responsible for & all the extra hype & media attention they gained worldwide. That level of positive media driven attention cannot be bought, it's invaluable to any corporate entity. If Dolan's concern is purely financially driven then wouldn't he want to hold onto all that? I don't think for a second that this was a money decision by Dolan. I think it was personal.

[Crazy⑧s]

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]



When the New York Knicks confirmed Tuesday evening that they had decided not to match the three-year, $25.1 million offer sheet tendered by the Houston Rockets to restricted free-agent point guard Jeremy Lin, many fans expressed sadness at what they viewed as the too-soon conclusion of Lin's brief, remarkably eventful tenure in Manhattan. (This one included.) Many others stood fast against that emotional tide, though, arguing that this was a logic-based decision predicated on the financial reality that Knicks owner and Madison Square Garden chairman James Dolan simply couldn't agree to pay a still-unproven commodity with a rotation-player resume just 26 games long a whopping $14.9 million for one year of work three years from now.

[Marc J. Spears: Rockets land Jeremy Lin after Knicks decline to match offer]
Even the NBA's most valuable franchise can't just sign up for $35 million luxury-tax payments, the argument went — and as I wrote Tuesday, the Knicks' balance sheet indicates they'd be writing a check at least that big in 2014-15 if they matched Lin's sheet, depending on how else they filled out the roster.

Strip out the emotion, they said, and as the New York Times' Howard Beck wrote, "the short answer" for why the Knicks would let Lin go is "money."

Except, of course, that you can never strip emotion out of the Knicks' decision-making process, because as our own Kelly Dwyer put it, "it appears as if the lone thing that James Dolan is an unmitigated expert at is stubbornness." Since the start of the "will they match/won't they match" drama, the talk around the Knicks was that the team's disinclination to bring him back had less to do with money than it did with Lord Jim's hurt feelings, which is exactly what Frank Isola of the New York Daily News wrote Wednesday:
The decision was both financial and emotional since Garden chairman James Dolan was upset over Lin restructuring his deal with Houston last week to include a third year salary of $14.9 million. Dolan, according to sources, felt he was deceived by the 23-year-old Lin.
"Much love and thankfulness to the Knicks and New York for your support this past year," Lin said on Twitter. "Easily the best year of my life. #ForeverGrateful."

Of course, team officials privately felt that Lin's actions over the past few weeks were anything but grateful. They were upset that he hired a publicist without their consent and were livid that the second-year point guard out of Harvard went back to the Rockets for more money. [...]
"Deceived." "Upset." "Without their consent." "Livid." Doesn't sound like bottom-line-based decision-making, does it?

Lin going "back to the Rockets for more money," as Isola put it, came after reports surfaced that Houston planned to sign Lin to a four-year, $28.8 million sheet — really three years and $19.5 million, since the Rockets would hold a team option for the fourth year — with the so-called "poison pill" coming in the third year, when the 23-year-old point guard would be due a $9.3 million payout.

The Knicks — both privately and publicly, according to Yahoo! Sports NBA columnist Adrian Wojnarowski, and repeatedly, as noted by BDL's Eric Freeman — vowed to match the sheet ... which led Rockets general manager Daryl Morey to reconfigure the offer to ratchet up the third-year value, bumping Lin's '14-15 salary up to $14.9 million and creating all sorts of heavy luxury tax implications. That, according to Isola's story, was the line in the sand for Dolan:
Dolan has a history of overpaying his players and has never shied away from the luxury tax before.
But in this case, Dolan felt betrayed by Lin for going back to Houston to rework the contract. After all, the Knicks acquired Lin in December after he was released by both Golden State and Houston.
And that's where it gets absurd. "Betrayed." "Betrayed!"

This wasn't an act of treason. This wasn't a violation of some sacred trust or blood oath. This was a player with the collectively bargained right to find out how much he was worth on the market doing so. This was another team with an interest in that player and the salary cap space available to sign him exercising its collectively bargained right to offer him a contract that increased its chances of doing so. This was how free agency works. Weeping and gnashing your teeth at that indicates that Dolan, general manager Glen Grunwald and company don't actually understand the rules of the game they're playing, which is about as apt a description of the way the New York Knicks organization has been run for the past dozen years as any I've yet read.

(And if, as Sports Illustrated's Sam Amick reports, the Knicks were frustrated with the Rockets — hey, "frustrated," another emotion-soaked descriptor — because Morey broke "an unspoken rule in negotiations by changing an informal offer during the moratorium that ran from July 1 to July 11," well, boy, then Dolan really showed Houston by allowing them to get the player they wanted in exactly the way they wanted to do it!)

Lin's return to New York wasn't predetermined by bonds of servitude or commanded by some kind of fealty after the Knicks signed him to the end of the bench and then got lucky as hell — all-time lucky, once-in-a-generation lucky, this-kind-of-thing-doesn't-happen lucky — when he became an on- and off-court thunderbolt. It was up to Dolan, Grunwald and the Knicks to actually pay him to play. That's the business that Lin, Dolan, Grunwald, Morey and everyone else in the NBA are actually in. That's what dictates and governs everything. Do you want to pay the man, or don't you?

If they didn't want to because A) they don't think Lin's good enough to pay what it'd cost, considering they've already got Raymond Felton, Jason Kidd and (unofficially) Pablo Prigioni in the fold at the point, or B) they decided in a sudden pang of financial conscience that they just couldn't justify spending eight-figure money on an unsure thing, then that's one thing. Personally, I disagree with those assessments — given Felton's heinous performance in Portland last year, Kidd's advanced age and the fact that the 35-year-old Prigioni has even less NBA experience than Lin does, I think Lin would enter the season as clearly the best point guard on the Knicks roster, and I'd point those terrified by the third-year balloon payment toward David Aldridge's roundup of the avenues that were available to the Knicks had they kept Lin and he didn't work out (Cliffs Notes: "stretch provision" and "giant expiring contract") — but fine. Reasonable people could differ about the validity of those decisions, but at least they'd be based on some kind of logic.

Allowing a young asset with the potential to mature and with significant demonstrable value already — both off the court and on it — to just walk away, though? Not having a plan in place to at least get something in return for the investment you made? Throwing your hands up because several completely reasonable things happened and you just straight-up got beat? That's not logic; it's tantrum. That doesn't make you some kind of principled, commendable soul; it just makes you a rash, ill-considered loser.
It makes you the Knicks. Forever and always, the Knicks.

[BillyHoyle]

I think Cablevision stood to gain a ton more money had they simply matched the offer than they would have had to spend on the luxury tax easily. If you don't believe me, just consider the money they made in profit when stock prices spiked during Linsanity, the new deal with Time Warner that it was directly responsible for & all the extra hype & media attention they gained worldwide. That level of positive media driven attention cannot be bought, it's invaluable to any corporate entity. If Dolan's concern is purely financially driven then wouldn't he want to hold onto all that? I don't think for a second that this was a money decision by Dolan. I think it was personal.

Ok, well you say Cablevision stood to gain...I'm going to assume here that was just a typo, since Cablevision and MSG are now separate companies.

With that said I want to address a few quick things:
1. The stock of MSG depends on a number of factors, not just Knicks.

You have to keep in mind that the company is about the revenue of MSG as a whole, so its value really depends on the economy and willingness of people to spend money on events at MSG (stronger economy=more money for people to spend at MSG=high stock price of MSG)

I agree that the 2 point rise in stock during linsanity, which i spend some time outlining in this post was directly attributed to Lin: [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

However, we have to ask why Lin was so valuable at that time. The answer is that the uncertainty from the MSG/Timewarner dispute caused the stock price of MSG to drop (it wasn't clear how long the company would be blacked out and at what terms the new deal would be agreed upon). Lin created a sensation that forced the hand of Timewarner to take MSG's deal, netting a ton of cash for Dolan and ending the cloud of uncertainty surrounding the negotiation. Basically, he came around at the perfect time, since it became unthinkable for 1/3rd of NY to be blacked out from Knicks games.

Now, however, the MSG/Timewarner deal is already agreed upon and cannot be renegotiated, so the value from that deal is set in stone. If investors really felt Dolan's decision not to match Lin's offer was a poor financial decision, you would have seen a much larger drop in MSG stock the past few days.

So, yes, I still think it is about saving the money. Also....From the SI article, Lin doesn't mention any dispute and makes it clear that he had very little contact with the Knicks FO, leaving barely any time for any so called bad blood to form.

[Ghostowl]

Lin is a goner now whether we like it or not.
Instead of talking about whats already happened, what do you guys think Lin's numbers will be in Houston? Im guessing 19 PPG, 6APG, 48% Shooting

Is there any hope that Dolan might be pressured to resign if Lin does amazing in Houston and the NY media calls for his head? I would like Dolan gone please, if Dolan gets kicked in the process, I would say the Lin trade was worth it :P

[vrgadin]

yeh, its yahoo, the dregs of the reporting world, but why am i not surprised its starting to leak out there that this whole lin thing was clownfaces insecurities. [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

iv said it before, its not about lin. its about the front office/ownership of the knicks that enrages fans. and the myriad of horrible decision making and childish behaviour over the years

[BIG APPLE SPORTS]

?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ????????????????????

[orangeblobman]

Best thing that can happen for the Knicks is that the Nets outperform them, then maybe Dolan will not have the guaranteed Garden sellouts he is used to, win or lose.

[petescud]

I don't see the Nets being any better then us .... another 7th/8th seed squad

[LINvincible]

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ].cnn.com/2012/basketball/nba/07/13/jeremy-lin-houston-rockets-offer-sheet.ap/index.html



[Only registered and activated users can see links. ].cnn.com/2012/basketball/nba/07/16/knicks-blazers-raymond-felton.ap/index.html



Once again, the Felton trade happened after Lin signed, not before.

"HOUSTON (AP) -- A person with direct knowledge of the move says Knicks guard [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] has signed an offer sheet with the [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]."

Read more: [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

Someone with Direct Knowledge? And from Houston too. Are you serious!

If the offer SHEET was actually sign on Friday July 13th, the deadline for the Knicks would have been (monday) July 16th 11:59pm, 3 days after the signing.
Why did the Knicks have a deadline of July 17th 11:59pm? 4 days after he sign? Jezzz....Do the math. It's quite simple.

That July 4th party tweet about Felton joining the Knicks said it all. The Knicks had Felton all locked up even BEFORE FA started on July 11th. The dude had 1 offer sitting in front of him. To say he was greedy and trying to paint him as the villian is wrong. The real villian here is Dolan and the front office of the Knicks.

Til today, the front office of the Knicks haven't release one response to what transpired. They got Steven A Smith and Frank Isola doing all the PR work for them.

It is what it is. This is a screw up of Biblical Proportions. If Lin turns out to be a star over the next few years, i will never set foot in MSG ever again.

[LINvincible]

I think Cablevision stood to gain a ton more money had they simply matched the offer than they would have had to spend on the luxury tax easily. If you don't believe me, just consider the money they made in profit when stock prices spiked during Linsanity, the new deal with Time Warner that it was directly responsible for & all the extra hype & media attention they gained worldwide. That level of positive media driven attention cannot be bought, it's invaluable to any corporate entity. If Dolan's concern is purely financially driven then wouldn't he want to hold onto all that? I don't think for a second that this was a money decision by Dolan. I think it was personal.

No, it's more than personal. It's simple a botch job. The Knicks front office only contacted Lin once in the entire off season. That says it all. They were going separate ways shortly after the season ended. That tweet on Felton joining the Knicks on July 4th also confirmed our suspicion. This is more than personal or financial. I think it has something to do with Melo wanting Lin out of town. Keep in mind, he was one of the 2 knuckle heads that came out and bashed Lin for that 'ridiculous' contract.

It couldn't have been more ridiculous than the one Melo signed. That sign and trade from the nuggets was one of the greatest heist of professional sports.

[LINvincible]

Sorry for all my ramblings folks.

I'm a frustrated Knicks fan and needed to release all this anger which have been built up over the past decade. I believe i'm not alone.

[NY17KNICKS]

Does this piss you Lin fans off?? LMAO

[tiger0330]

Sorry for all my ramblings folks.

I'm a frustrated Knicks fan and needed to release all this anger which have been built up over the past decade. I believe i'm not alone.

I feel you I had to dump my Lin sig and avatar, never had a sig or avatar before Lin.

Lin fits better with Houston than the Knicks so I'm happy for him but most Knicks fans are sorry to see him go.