NBA Free Agency 2012 – Jeremy Lin Won’t Be Returning to the New York Knicks by Reggie Williams

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Updated: July 16, 2012

Until the deadline passes, it’s not official that the offer from the Houston Rockets will be matched, but all of the moves that the New York Knicks are making indicate that point guard Jeremy Lin will be playing somewhere else next season. Keeping him in New York is proving to be too costly over the next few seasons.

The Rockets offered Lin a just over $5 million for each of the first couple of seasons and a whopping $14.8 million in the third, which works out to be about $25 million for three years of service. If the Knicks were to match this offer, that would owe $75 million to four players in 2014-2015, thanks to the contracts of power forward Amare Stoudemire, small forward Carmelo Anthony and center Tyson Chandler. With the luxury tax, Lin’s cost to the team at that point would be over $30 million.

Until the last couple of days, everything coming out of New York’s clubhouse was pointing towards Lin returning to the team, some sources even saying that the Knicks would match anything up to $1 billion. When point guard Jason Kidd signed on with the team for three years and $9 million, he said that part of his desire to sign in New York was a chance to be some kind of tutor for Lin. Now it seems that Raymond Felton, who had a very good season with the Knicks in 2010-2011 before getting traded to the Denver Nuggets, will be returning as the first point guard.

Felton averaged 11.4 points and 6.5 assists for the Portland Trail Blazers last season and will probably be headed to New York via a sign-and-trade deal, although what the Knicks will send to the Northwest in return is still unknown. But it seems that the Felton trade has been another one of the moves by the Knicks that have upset Lin and made him hope that the offer won’t be matched.

Lin was initially disappointed about New York’s stalling regarding matching the offer sheet by the Rockets, but there’s nothing he can do about it, nor can the team. The NBA is a business. Re-signing Lin might be the right thing from a professional standpoint, but it appears to be a terrible one in financial terms. Maybe the Knicks will regret giving Chandler and Stoudemire huge contracts – which could cost them one of the most marketable stars in the NBA – but at the moment, it just seems like the logical thing to do.