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The Jeremy Lin revisionist history begins in New York

Remember Jeremy Lin? Sure you do. Good kid, impressive numbers, came from nowhere to save the New York Knicks from yet another season of irrelevancy last season.

But after a historic run at the point guard position, Lin committed the cardinal sin, in New York City terms, of looking elsewhere for employment. The Houston Rockets offered Lin an impressive contract, and New York bade him farewell. The Knicks will start the year with Raymond Felton and a wizened codger who bears a vague resemblance to Jason Kidd at the point position.

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Still suffering from the effects of a knee injury, Lin hasn't exactly lit Houston on fire. And that has brought out the gleeful told-ya-so types in the New York media. As Tom Ziller at SB Nation notes, Mitch Lawrence of the New York Daily News is among those helping New York Knicks fans "remember" that hey, maybe Jeremy Lin wasn't all that great after all:

Lin didn't have microfracture surgery or tear his ACL, so we can now safely assume that he's one of the world's slowest healers. But let's also remember that even before his storybook career in New York effectively ended [in March], he was anything but a premier athlete. Any problem he might have because of the knee in the future is going to make the Rockets' $25 million investment look even more ridiculous than it did last July.

Lawrence also goes the "anonymous source" route in ripping Lin, a move Ziller calls "pure cowardice."

[Related: Royce White attempting to secure a bus for some Houston road games]

It's possible that Lin was a lightning-in-a-bottle, flash-in-a-pan, pick-your-cliche shooting star, and that the Rockets did indeed overpay. But Lin did what no other player since Patrick Ewing and John Starks has been able to do -- make people outside of New York care about the Knicks. Slicing him to pieces before he's even played a regular-season game for Houston smacks of spurned love. And if there's one thing that sportswriters, and particularly New York sportswriters, can't stand, it's to be left behind. Expect much more of this out of the Big Apple as the year goes on, whether or not Lin plays up to expectation.

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