NBA Free Agency 2012: Jeremy Lin Had Right to Spurn Knicks for Houston

Jeremy Lin was a restricted free agent this summer, and as a restricted free agent, he had the right to sign offer sheets with other teams.

Somehow, Madison Square Garden chairman James Dolan didn't get the memo.

Frank Isola of the New York Daily News reported on Wednesday that it wasn't so much the lucrative offer from the Houston Rockets that saw the New York Knicks go a different direction; it was the principle of Lin signing a backloaded offer that upset Dolan.

According to Isola, Dolan felt "betrayed" when Lin signed the backloaded deal because it made it more difficult for the Knicks to sign him. The third year of the contract would have likely put the Knicks in luxury tax territory.

Keep in mind that the Knicks told Lin to go out and see what he could find on the market. They put themselves in a bad position from the start, and now Dolan is blaming Lin for the disaster.

This, folks, is why the Knicks franchise is criticized all the time—they don't use common sense.

Lin had been toiling in the D-League, including small stints with the Golden State Warriors and Rockets, before he exploded last season. He also went undrafted out of Harvard. Of course he was going to look for the best offer out there and try to maximize his earnings—that's what a smart businessman does.

Dolan has nobody to be upset with but himself. He handled the Lin situation the wrong way this offseason, and it backfired. That's not Lin's fault. 

Even if the Knicks had matched the backloaded offer, Lin still would have been a marketing icon off the basketball court in New York. The gains the Knicks would have made would have been huge. Instead, they screwed up the one thing they couldn't screw up this offseason and now find themselves with Raymond Felton as their starting point guard.

Even when the Knicks appear to have a good thing going these days, they find a way to implode from within.

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