Lin has such enormous potential to help the Knicks expoiit the Asian and Asian American markets that I don't believe for a second that money has anything to do with this. This was a basketball decision -- the Knicks are hiding behind money as an excuse.
Did 'Melo's team make the decision? Admittedly I don't know that, and my instinct could be wrong, but this is not about money -- this is about the team on the floor. Ask yourself why the Knicks never offered Lin a contract before the free agency period to see if he'd take an amount the Knicks were willing to live with if this was really about money.
We can question the wisdom in the Knicks' decision to allow the league to set the market for Lin rather than locking him up beforehand themselves, but that's 20-20 hindsight. It was a strategy decision, good or bad. If they were truly set on keeping Lin, it's not the first time and certainly not the last that the Knicks had a poor business strategy. But to try to pinpoint one factor--e.g., Melo's wishes--ignores the multi-factored reality of most of these decisions.
Whatever the constellation of factors was, money was most certainly one of them; and there was obviously a tipping point beyond which the Knicks were not going to make the deal. The Asian marketing potential is just that--potential. At the numbers Lin was likely to cost them in the third year, they needed a lot more than potential. I'm not a salary cap whiz, but from what I understand Lin's $15M third year could cost the Knicks up to $50M
additional in luxury tax payments alone, depending on whether they are serial offenders (as expected) and by how much they have exceeded the cap. In that scenario, the additional $6M that Lin snookered out of the deal could end up costing the Knicks more than $20M in penalties. That's a helluva lot of Linsanity jerseys.
Even so, I would not have been shocked if Dolan took the chance. I think the final straw was the sense of betrayal, that Lin went behind the Knicks' back and conspired with Houston to really exploit the Knicks with the poison pill. Whatever the reason, I think it was the right decision. At those numbers, you can't justify the risk imo. In order to make up the difference with marketing opportunities, you would have feel pretty much guaranteed that Lin would play well enough to earn time on the floor to generate the exposure needed to sell the merchandise and the tickets. He simply does not have the track record on which anyone can say that's a safe bet. And knowing all too well how viciously the pressures of the expectations generated by a weighty contract can cause players to crumble, I would not be very sanguine about a happy ending to the Jeremy Lin story if the Knicks did match the terms offered by Houston.
As an aside, I also would not be shocked to learn that, when he boarded the plane for Las Vegas to re-do the Houston offer sheet, Lin realized--and hoped--that there was a very good chance that the Knicks would not match the new terms. He will have a lot less pressure in Houston than he would have in New York, especially after all this drama. I realize that he played and thrived under some pretty intense pressure last season, but by any standard that's a small sample size, and I'm not sure that even he is confident that it will be representative of his future performance.
