From the beginning, Melo has always been the Knick most threatened by Linsanity, and the most skeptical about it. There is no question that Lin’s ethnicity is a huge factor in his popularity—a bigger factor, even, than his actual play on the court, as splendid as it has been—but there’s also no question that Lin’s ethnicity is a huge factor in the ongoing suspicion that his marvelous play thus far is a mirage. Now obviously I can’t read Carmelo Anthony’s mind, but it sure seems like he still believes what a lot of people did in those flush first few days of Lin’s meteoric rise: he can’t really be this good because he doesn’t look like a guy who’s really this good.

(A quick aside: Lin’s three year, $25 million contract isn’t "ridiculous." It’s a great deal for the Rockets, who get a bargain for two years and at worst an expiring contract / trade asset in the third. It arguably would’ve been ridiculous for the Knicks because of luxury-tax implications, but when you have the Knicks’ contract history to defend, and Jim Dolan’s bottomless wealth, what exactly does ridiculous mean? Before you answer, consider that in the last year of Carmelo’s deal alone, he will make … $24 million. Let’s hope he’s won more than one playoff game for the Knicks by then. The average annual salary in the NBA is a bit over $5 million. Lin’s contract classifies him as "above average." Is paying Lin the salary of an above average NBA player really "ridiculous"? So ridiculous that he should be called out publicly for it?)

And then there’s Jim Dolan, whose fury over Lin’s "betrayal" has leaked over the last 72 hours into every single sports publication with a working NBA beat reporter. There’s no point in parsing the reasons why Dolan feels betrayed and whether they’re valid. The real question is, why is Dolan taking it so personally? Lin was reportedly disappointed the Knicks told him to shop around in the first place—he wanted to stay put—but he got over it. Why was Lin aggressively testing the market (i.e., doing what the Knicks told him to do) such an affront? Could it be that Dolan thought the nice, quiet, devout Christian Taiwanese kid would be too cowed by The Great Man to play hardball over money? Could it be that he thought he owned Lin, had made him, and became furious when Lin refused to behave like it? Could it be that he expected Lin to be more – ethnic stereotype alert – submissive?

And how do we explain leaks about Dolan (reportedly) using words like "betrayed" and "deceived" to describe Lin over the same weekend that newly acquired Knick Jason Kidd got so fall down drunk that he crashed his car into a tree—with nary a word of criticism from Dolan? Jeremy Lin is the bad guy here?

I’m doing more mind-reading here with Dolan—never a safe proposition. But here’s what I am confident saying about Dolan on the subject of Lin’s ethnicity: he has absolutely no grasp of what Jeremy Lin really means as a cultural phenomenon. It does not pierce his bubble. It stirs no emotion in him. He doesn’t understand what it means for millions of people in this country, and around the world, to watch the first Asian-American superstar athlete excel on the highest stage, and what it means to have that player wearing the uniform of his team. The pride, the joy, the inspiration, the transformative effect it can have on an entire generation of kids.

That stuff is real. It only becomes hokey when people like me try to capture it with words on a page. If Dolan got that, he never would’ve let the Lin situation unravel over scratch money (to him, anyway) and petty animus. He would’ve sat the kid down, talked it out, buried the hatchet. And then he would’ve signed the deal.

Instead Dolan let him walk away. For nothing. Go ahead and call it stupid. Just don’t say that’s all it is.