Superficially, it was one playoff victory over LeBron James and the Miami Heat this spring on the way to another first-round exit. Spiritually, it was the brief but remarkable emergence of Lin during a galvanizing month that saved the season and made Dolan’s arena feel like the world’s most famous in more than its customary, self-aggrandizing way.

Then the Houston Rockets adopted the very strategy in their restricted free-agency pursuit of Lin that the Garden had forever used to crowbar talent from less-endowed competitors. All of a sudden the normally free-spending Dolan decided it was time to stop the Linsanity. With a gun to his head that was loaded with a potential $35 million luxury-tax penalty on top of a $14.9 million balloon payment in the third year of Lin’s contract, he hid behind the reasonable-sounding excuse of a long-elusive fiscal prudence.

Many have agreed with the rationale that Lin, based on the sampling of his work, just was not worth it. Then again, did Dolan banish Lin — who was about 20 minutes from being a former N.B.A. player while vegetating on the end of the Knicks’ bench early last season — from New York on the grounds of his being an ingrate and daring to exploit his leverage for what could be the one time in his basketball career?

In contrast to Lin’s work, there is more than a sampling of Dolan’s, enabling us to make an educated guess as to how cool and calculated he was upon learning that Lin and the Rockets had conspired to make their deal even more tax punitive for him to match. Anthony, inhabiting the place in Dolan’s heart once reserved for Isiah Thomas, chimed in by calling the Lin deal “ridiculous,” as if his time in New York had produced anything close to the surge in interest and profit resulting from Lin’s achievements, however limited, last season.