Acquiring Raymond Felton Most Likely Means Linsanity Is Over In NYC

Added by Stephen Zimkouski on July 15, 2012.

With the Knicks trading for Raymond Felton, the Jeremy Lin (pictured) era in New York may be over.

The trade Saturday Night that sent Raymond Felton and Kurt Thomas back to the New York Knicks may have been one of the biggest trades in team history.

The Knicks sent Jared Jeffries and Dan Gadzuric as well as a future second round pick  to Portland in exchange for the players previously named. This means that it is highly unlikely the Knicks will match the 3-year $25 million offer sheet signed by Jeremy Lin with the Houston Rockets.

First, lets recap the moves that lead up to this. The Knicks picked up some some solid veterans in Jason Kidd and Marcus Camby. They signed James White and Pablo Prigioni hoping that they can contribute off the bench without expecting or spending too much. The Knicks then brought back two of their own in Steve Novak and J.R. Smith while letting Landry Fields go to the Toronto Raptors for 3-years and roughly $19 million.

Now that we’re all caught up lets look at how a team possibly without Jeremy Lin will look next season and how big the impact might be.

The Knicks still have depth but obviously take a big hit without Lin. He may be overrated but Lin is a good player with a lot of potential. I think Knicks fans also can’t expect the Raymond Felton that played here under former coach Mike D’Antoni. I think Felton will get in better shape as he has a lot to prove and loved his time playing in New York. So, we should expect to see Felton halfway between his bad play with the Denver Nuggets and Portland Trailblazers and his time with the Knicks where he was playing all star quality basketball.

It’s going to be weird to not see Jeremy Lin in a Knicks uniform if this happens because most of us had penciled him in to be with the team for at least the next three seasons and didn’t doubt that for a second. The Knicks still have some of the best fans in basketball so I don’t expect a lot of buzz around the team to go away but they will lose a lot of the casual fans who watched the tean just for Linsanity and those that learned to love the team from that. Casual New York fans might be jumping on the Brooklyn Nets bandwagon as they’ve had a good off-season, a new state of the art stadium and very nice apparel.

The best way to sum it up is to look at the ride Tim Tebow had with the Denver Broncos last season; how the fans and the city supported him so heavily and it seemed as if he was going to be in Denver for a long time. The big difference is the Broncos brought in Peyton Manning who is arguably the greatest quarterback of all time to fill the void and the Knicks brought in a 39 year old point guard (Kidd) who’s skills are diminishing quickly, a guy who has been called out of shape for the past year and a 35 year old rookie to replace Lin.

It will be an interesting basketball season in New York this fall, that’s safe to say.