If all goes as expected, the Knicks will match the Rockets’ four-year, $28.8 million offer sheet for Jeremy Lin. The guy who came out of nowhere last season to do crazy things for the Knicks and astound the basketball world for two, maybe three, weeks and then fizzled out almost as quickly as he came into the spotlight (thanks mostly to injury), that guy’s getting offered $29 million? Yes, over four years in one of those whacky and problematic “poison pill” contracts.
While it might seem to some basketball observers that offering $29 million to a wild card like Lin might qualify as overpaying, former Knicks coach Larry Brown doesn’t necessarily disagree. Brown on Thursday was a guest on The Mike Lupica Show and expressed some reservations about New York going in for that much on the popular point guard.
“I think the kid was great,” Brown said. “The system helped him be really great. It’s a wonderful story. But I look at him as a terrific backup in the NBA. I may be wrong, I really want him to be successful but I think if you overpay him for the interest that he created that’s not the best thing.
“I think you overpay him if you think he’s going to make you better, going to make Stoudemire better, going to make Carmelo better, going to make Tyson better….then pay him as much as you can.”
Brown was coach of the Knicks when Isiah Thomas was running the team. So, you’d think he’d know a bad Knicks transaction when he sees one.
H/T Game On!
Photo: Geoff Burke-US PRESSWIRE
