The Linsanity saga is all but over in New York, but there are still few answers. What exactly compelled the New York Knicks to decide to let go of perhaps one of the best stories in their history?
Jeremy Lin is a Houston Rocket right now, but we don't know exactly WHY he's a Houston Rocket. We don't know why the Knicks seemed to assure everyone everywhere that they were going to retain the Palo Alto sensatioin, only to rescind on those promises at the eleventh hour and let him walk.
And no one in the Knicks organization seems ready to make a comment on the subject. Howard Beck of the New York Times has this to report.
Friday marks the one-month anniversary of the Knicks’ decision to let Lin leave for Houston. Not a single team official has stepped forward to explain the move. It appears no team official will say anything until media day, on Oct. 1.
By then, two and a half months will have passed, giving the Knicks a convenient and self-created loophole: That’s old news. The approved script will no doubt be, "We’re looking forward" and "We’re focused on the players who are here" and "Look, Raymond Felton lost weight!"
It almost surely will not include a meaningful explanation of why the Knicks let their most popular player in a decade leave, rather than match a three-year, $25 million contract. Commenting runs counter to the Knicks’ prevailing, almost-pathological culture of silence.
Lin's status is always going to be a target of mass debate, but it does seem odd the Knicks would suddenly go dark on his departure. This is a man who helped provide New York with its greatest injection of natural fan enthusiasm in ages. To squander it all in a matter of hours because Lin decided to ask for a larger raise seems petty and self-destructive.
Yet it's starting to look like that's exactly what happened.
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