Jim Dolan just made one of the dumbest moves of his basketball life, which is saying a mouthful. The owner of the New York Knicks, who has spent years wearing a "Kick Me" sign on his back, just kicked out the Madison Square Garden door a promising 23-year-old point guard, a player who averaged 18 points and eight assists the one time someone in the NBA decided to start him instead of fire him.

Jeremy Lin was going places, and now he's going, going, gone. The Knicks voted him off the island of Manhattan. They voted against matching his $25.1 million offer sheet, the one he signed with the Houston Rockets, and barely thanked the kid for the memories, for making New Yorkers feel good about their basketball team for the first time in forever and, oh yeah, for making that nasty dispute between Cablevision and Time Warner go poof in the night.

James Dolan has doled out big money to the likes of Eddy Curry, Larry Brown and Isiah Thomas. But Jeremy Lin is too expensive? Chris Trotman/Getty Images

At least Knicks fans found comfort in that future first-round pick the Rockets sent their way. Or was it Houston's rights to Royce White? Or the services of Kevin Martin to help fill the void at the two?

Actually, the Knicks didn't even get an autographed Yao Ming jersey in return. Dolan and GM Glen Grunwald and head coach Mike Woodson dispatched the same relative rookie who dropped 38 on Kobe's Lakers, the same guy whose 2012 stats put to shame those of many accomplished 23-year-old point guards of the past, Steve Nash included, without getting a player or pick for their trouble.

Just so they could hand the ball to the unworthy likes of Raymond Felton, a decent ex-Knick who was outplayed last season by -- you got it -- Jeremy Lin.

Felton is likely a bigger creation of the Mike D'Antoni system than his predecessor at the point ever was. He's four years older than Lin, and as a seven-year veteran he isn't getting any better and isn't getting his new team any closer to Miami.

But the Knicks ran off Lin anyway, if only to make the point that nobody -- not even the inspiration of the worldwide craze known as Linsanity -- crosses Jim Dolan and gets away with it. Just last week, after it was reported Lin had verbally agreed to a Houston guarantee worth nearly $20 million, Woodson announced that the Knicks would "absolutely" match the offer and that Lin would "absolutely" open as his starting quarterback.

Only the Knicks "absolutely" lost their minds after Lin took Woodson's empty pledges back to the negotiating table, inflated his poison-pill wage in Year 3 from $9.3 million to nearly $15 million, and stuck the Knicks with a luxury-tax bill in 2014-15 that would've left Warren Buffett cowering under a table.