Jeremy Lin Deal More of the Same in Bad Business NBA

So let me see if I have this right. The Houston Rockets have completed the offseason free agency swoop going for Jeremy Lin's services signing him to a three-year, $25 million dollar contract. A back-loaded deal that will see Lin make $14.8 million in that third year.

$14.8 million. That's more than Manu Ginobili, Russell Westbrook, Tony Parker and Rajon Rondo made this past season.  Of point guards currently under contract, only Deron Williams, Derrick Rose and Westbrook are due to make more money than Lin in the 2014-15 season. 

Lin played some remarkably good basketball over a 35-game stretch last season with the New York Knicks.  The Harvard grad was undrafted out of college and twice cut before rising from anonymity and his brother's couch into an instantaneous SportsCenter, social media and popular sensation in the nation's largest media market.

In a seven-game winning streak that turned the Knicks season around, Lin scored more than 20 points in nine of ten games including a last second three pointer to beat the Toronto Raptors on Valentine's Day.

But "Linsanity" was soon dampened by a string of losses to tougher opposition, Mike D'Antoni's firing as head coach of the Knicks and Lin's election to undergo knee surgery at the end of March that ended his regular season.

And though Lin admitted to reporters before Game 5 of the Knicks season-ending playoff series against the eventual NBA champion Miami Heat that he was "85 percent" healthy he did not dress for the game.

The final average stats on Lin's 2011-12 NBA season: 14.6 points, 6.2 assists, 3.1 rebounds in 35 games.  In a backup role behind Stephen Curry in Golden State in 2010-11, Lin averaged 2.6, 1.4 and 1.2 in limited minutes in 29 games.

Despite what you may or may not think of Lin's potential as an NBA starter or the exponential nature of his marketability to the Asian and Asian-American communities, this contract is ridiculous and especially so in the context of the post-lockout era.

I don't want to get bogged down in the dirty details of the extensive negotiations between players and owners last summer but my understanding of the differences revolved around the revenue split from the NBA's lucrative TV contracts and the struggles of team owners to survive and compete with the runaway inflationary nature of player salaries.  

Artificially hyping the market for Lin and offering him this contract, as Houston did, is a repeat of the type of business that led to the untenable situation many of the owners had us believe the league was in prior to the lockout.

How different is this summer than any other before the latest labor deal? The answer is it's not.  The concessions the owners gained in the revenue split look destined to be squandered as nothing has or will change until the owners themselves change the way they do business.

NBA player salary information from Spotrac and HoopsHype.