Spurned by the Knicks, Jeremy Lin Is Heading to Houston HONG KONG - He was a bench player, nothing more, a brainy kid from Harvard who had stumbled into a starting position with the New York Knicks. Nobody expected very much. He was a sub, really, a placeholder until injured players could heal up. But in February, when Jeremy Lin finally got the ball at the point, things began to happen. Linsanity happened. A career happened. A global phenomenon happened. Mr. Lin, who turns 24 next month, led the woeful Knicks to a remarkable string of victories, in the process becoming one of the most popular athletes in New York in decades. But he was let go by the Knicks on Tuesday. The team declined to match an offer sheet from the Houston Rockets, a deal worth $25.1 million over three years. Ironically, the Rockets (and the Warriors) had cut Mr. Lin last year. Goodbye, 尼克斯. Hello, 火箭. As the first Taiwanese-American and the fourth Asian-American to play in the N.B.A, Mr. Lin gained an immediate and passionate following in Taiwan, on mainland China and among the Chinese diaspora. He was also just the fourth Harvard alumnus to make the show. "Well, that's that," said the Angry Asian Man blog. I know that many Knicks fans are heartbroken, and people will point fingers in all directions for how this went down. For you, New York, I give you this article from The Onion: 'Jeremy Lin's Departure Teaches Knicks Fans Important Lesson About Getting Excited By The Knicks.'  My colleague Howard Beck reports that Mr. Lin's time with the Knicks was "a memorable, often spectacular run, filled with buzzer-beating shots, dazzling passes and bold drives to the rim." One of those last-second shots, seen here, beat the Toronto Raptors in February. That victory was then the sixth in a row for the Knicks, who had been struggling until Mr. Lin began to start. It might fairly be said that the game-winner against the Raptors solidified Linsanity as a global phenomenon. Rendezvous also reported on the angry reaction to the phrase "chink in the armor" being used in ESPN reports on Mr. Lin - once on air, then again on the network's mobile Web site. Jay Caspian Kang, writing on Grantland, suggests that Mr. Lin had offended the Knicks owner, James L. Dolan, by even considering offers from other teams. His piece is headlined "Dumb Move, Dolan." "At the start of all this silliness," Mr. Kang, writes, "the Knicks told Lin to go out and get whatever he could get on the open market. They guaranteed that they would match any salary offer because - wink-wink - Jeremy Lin is worth a ton of money and there's like a ton of people in China who will now buy Lin no. 17 jerseys. But Mr. Kang also says: If we give the Knicks the full benefit of the doubt and assume that all James Dolan cares about is building a championship team, there's an argument to be made that Jeremy Lin might not be a championship-level point guard. Let's not forget that Linsanity came crashing to a halt in a regular-season game against the Heat, when Mario Chalmers, LeBron James, and Dwyane Wade seemed to go out of their way to hassle, outmuscle, and embarrass Lin. Howard says the ultimate decision by the Knicks "was said to be financial, not emotional." The structuring of Mr. Lin's Houston contract calls for a third-year balloon payment of nearly $15 million, which would have caused a luxury tax of $35 million to kick in if the Knicks had matched it. "This so-called poison pill was devised by the Rockets," Howard writes, "to dissuade the Knicks from matching, and it proved effective." Here is Howard's summary of Mr. Lin's 26-game tenure as the Knicks' starting guard: It began with a seven-game winning streak that electrified the Garden and spawned a household word: Linsanity. Along the way, Lin outdueled Kobe Bryant in a victory over the Los Angeles Lakers and outshone Dirk Nowitzki to beat the Dallas Mavericks. His fame grew exponentially because of his unique profile: a Harvard graduate and Taiwanese-American who went undrafted and was waived twice before finding his niche with the Knicks. A knee injury, and subsequent surgery, ended Lin's magical run in late March. He averaged 18.5 points and 7.6 assists in that run - statistics that would place him among the N.B.A.'s top point guards if he had sustained them for a full season. Yet Lin also had an above-average turnover rate, and he struggled against some of the league's top defensive teams, notably the Miami Heat, who harassed him into 1-for-11 shooting and eight turnovers on Feb. 23.