Durvasa already answered this but it seems no one paid attention to his post. Here it is: Why Flynn wasn't waived. Waiving Flynn would have involved a buyout of his remaining guaranteed $3.4M. All of that would have counted against the salary cap for this season. If another team signed him to a contract, any money paid to him this season would have been counted against the Rockets' buyout, but based on Flynn's production so far he probably wouldn't have warranted close to a $3.4M contract. It would make no sense to pay a guy exactly what he would have been paid anyway to play for someone else AND have him count against the salary cap. Why Flynn wasn't amnestied. The amnesty clause probably won't be used by the Rockets as long as Luis Scola is still on the books. His contract, while pretty much everyone agrees is a very good one for the team, is through the 2014/2015 season (although IIRC it becomes not fully guaranteed somewhere close to the end). It wouldn't make sense to use that sort of advantage to shed such a small amount of salary ($3.4M or $6.4M) when Scola is still owed almost $40M. The amnesty clause will likely only be used to save the team's cap if Scola (god forbid) has some sort of career ending injury or if dropping his salary is necessary to sign a marquee free agent. Why Flynn wasn't traded As a few people mentioned, his trade value was pretty low at the start of the season. One thing Morey has made clear is that he lets market value determine what players are worth. At the time of this whole process, for whatever reason, Morey decided that what he could bring back in a trade for Flynn (or any of the '09 guys) didn't exceed the value he placed on him, so he didn't make a kneejerk trade. The fact that LA and NY started calling about Flynn yesterday is proof that, yes, demand for a certain position does indeed change the value teams place on players. Why Lin was waived. His contract was fully un-guaranteed, he plays a position that was already heavily contested coming in behind Lowry, Dragic, and Flynn, all of whom have guaranteed contracts, and it seems that it made more sense to hang onto a big guy (Jeff Adrien) with room for growth after the Rockets' woes in the post over the past few seasons. Although he apparently had a very good training camp, he was the most rational person to cut. He even said this himself.
At any rate, the young guy deserves his shot at NBA floor time & is making the most of it. He's earned it. Whatever the reason he's not here anymore, and we're all still waiting for this trade Morey's going to make using Flynn. But its apparent than Lin is the better ball player. Lin just had to leave town for a chance & boy is he looking good early on! Good for Lin. He's easy to root for.
id rather see him getting time in NY to show case his talent. I had no doubt of Lin's very high bball iq when he played for us, but what impressed me most was his hustle and effort.The kid plays hard, and its nice to finally see an asian born american in the NBA.
I would have kept Line or Smith even without watching them play. However, as pointed out by others in this thread, there were 5+ million reasons against my opinion.
when you have high quality guard play like the rockets do choosing between flynn and lin was simply a financial decision. we all saw that lin was better than flynn in the preseason game.(the same likely applies to golden state) in NY the guard play is so ****ty that Lin finally got a chance and shined, its unlikely he would have ever gotten the same chance here
