Linsanity Close to Returning to Houston; Knicks Acquire Felton

A year ago they let him take a few shots and then cut him. Now — according to CBSSports– the Houston Rockets are set to give Jeremy Lin close to $25 million to bring him back to Houston.

The Rockets offered Lin a $25 million contract and it’s appearing like the Knicks are fine with not matching it and letting him walk to his first NBA home. This comes as a bit of a shock to Knicks fans who heard all last week that no matter the offer New York would match. According to an ESPN “insider”, source (jokingly) claimed the Knicks would match anything up to $1 billion.

But now there has been a violent change of tone in New York as they now are ready to let Lin go and replace him with point guard Raymond Felton — which is the next mind boggling twist to this story.

But the twists don’t end there. South Carolina TV Reporter Mark Haggard tweeted that he had spoke to Raymond Felton who informed him of the deal.

Shortly after twitter exploded from the bomb Haggard dropped, he reneged on the tweet.

A much more credible source — Washington Post Radio and NBA TV analyst David Aldridge– didn’t confirm that the deal was on or off but he did say that Houston’s chances of landing Lin were “a lot better than yesterday.”

Felton spent some good years with the Knicks and joins the parade of players returning to their former teams this summer. But Felton is not superstar material and now the Knicks have to winder how cost Jason Kidd will be backing up Felton or vice versa.

The Rockets also have an interesting situation themselves. After spending their money like a bratty child, they now have to pay the consequences for freely blowing their money on free agents. All offseason long the Rockets have become a serious target for Dwight Howard. But before you even get into the debate of will he/won’t he sign long term with the Rockets, Houston has to deal with their salary.

Houston decided to go hard after Bulls back up center Omer Asik and threw $25 million at him. He has yet to sign the offer sheet but he’s expected to as soon as the Jeremy Lin situation is sorted out. Once that happens the Rockets will have roughly $30 million tied up between two players in the third year of their contracts.

This highly complicates their pursuit of Dwight Howard who will command an insane contract in his own right.

The Rockets can finagle their way out of some salary cap heat because if the Chicago Bulls don’t match Asik’s offer sheet, Houston can break up the back loaded contract into an $8 million annual salary.

Houston has been shedding contracts left and right sending Kyle Lowry to Toronto and straight up cutting Luis Scola.

The other side of the fence isn’t much prettier. New York is also losing Landry Fields who signed an offer sheet from the Toronto Raptors. New York has paid no attention to Fields, focusing all their attention on the Lin situation. New York is also in a bit of a salary grind with big parts of Carmelo Anthony and Amare Stoudemire’s contracts coming up in the nest few years.

The craziest part of the story is that New York hasn’t yet even received the offer sheet from the Rockets. But they acquired Felton from the Blazers and it’s hard to imagine Felton being the third string point guard in New York.