The Shrine

So it seems like almost everyone is saying Knicks made a bad deal even though he'd cost them something like 58 million for the third year had they matched the offer ($15 million salary + $43 million in luxury tax). I don't get how people are saying 'well he's Chinese so he'll make the money back from China". I'm Chinese and I'll play for NBA team for a million dollars but nobody's going to want me because I obviously am not qualified to play in NBA and people don't just buy jerseys of people who totally suck even if they're from your country. There certainly been other Chinese guys who didn't play too well and they sure didn't make them team $60 million or whatever. Yes I know people say the MSG stock market cap went up by whatever millions but market cap is more of a conceptualization. Apple is worth $500 billion but it's not like they can go to this world market somewhere and offer to trade Apple for half of the USA's GDP or whatever the fraction works out to be. It's a useful tool to get an idea of what a company is worth it but wiping out a trillion in market cap isn't the same as setting $1 trillion worth of property on fire. At any rate you can argue the higher market cap was completely unsustainable because it seems to assume Lin will be the next Jordan which is probably not going to happen.

Honestly I think his injury was really convenient since he played well for 25 games and then got hurt. It seems like the he can only go down after that brilliant stretch but if he bombed the last 20 games or so and especially in the playoffs obviously no one's going to offer him a big contract. Heck, the $25 million over 3 years is still isn't exactly a mind boggling amount of money if not for the fact that it'd cost NY nearly 60 million to match year 3 since they're way in the luxury tax (but Houston is not). It's pretty clear it's one of those poison pill clause like the stuff I read about in NFL where a guy who plays for Minnesota might have a clause like 'this guys gets 500% raise if he didn't play 8 games in a stadium with average temperature of 10F' and there's no way NY could've matched it without getting hurt.

I dont think the Knicks office people were all that enamored with him. The fans were, thats for sure, but i think the Knicks dodged a bullet when the Rockets made that offer. It gave them an excuse to let him go, much like Denver did with Tebow.

Well I was reading an article saying you really want to avoid overpaying role players to be successful in NBA. You can afford to overplay star player since those guys wins you the games but the generic guys that makes $5-8 million in NBA are literally dime a dozen. Even averaged out his contract is $8.3 million per year which is a lot to be paying for what looks like an average PG. Steve Nash gets paid about that much. The actual structure (5/5/15 million) made it impossible for this to make sense financially by the time the third year rolls around unless he became Chris Paul by then.

Flip wrote:I dont think the Knicks office people were all that enamored with him. The fans were, thats for sure, but i think the Knicks dodged a bullet when the Rockets made that offer. It gave them an excuse to let him go, much like Denver did with Tebow.

Good idea, but that comic doesnt make sense. Manning isnt helping Tebow win a Super Bowl... the first box should be Tebwo saying, "Dear Jesus help this team win a Super Bowl." or something...