Bill Gutman - Jeremy Lin: The Incredible Rise of the NBAs Most Unlikely Superstar

JEREMY LIN

The Incredible Rise of the NBAs Most

Unlikely Superstar

BILL GUTMAN

Copyright 2012 by Bill Gutman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file. ISBN: 9781-61321279-0

To my very good friends, Thomas and Betty Jones

W HAT ARE THE odds of a guy, sitting at the end of an NBA bench on the verge of being cut, being summoned into a game and suddenly starring in it? Okay, lets say that can happen. Most any athlete can suddenly find lightening in a bottle on a given night, but what if that same player earns a start because of the combination of that one game and several injuries to other players? What are the odds that he will not only take over the team from the demanding position of point guard, but lead a floundering, sub- .500 ballclub to an unlikely seven-game winning streak while breaking several longstanding records along the way? And then, what are the odds of that player, one of the very few Asian-Americans ever to play in the NBA, not only becoming the toast of the town and the toast of the NBA, but the hottest commodity in all of sports?

It sure sounds like a fairytale; the ultimate underdog storyone that might be hard to believe if it were introduced as a piece of fictionbut it did happen, and its continuing to happen right now. The point guard is Jeremy Lin of the New York Knicks, a player not recruited out of high school, a Harvard graduate not drafted by any NBA team, and a guy who was waived by two teams and almost cut by a third. Given a chance by coach Mike DAntoni, whose Knicks team was a moribund 815 at the time, Lin showed both basketball and leadership skills that no one in the NBA knew he had. With the teams two resident stars, Carmelo Anthony and Amare Stoudemire, both out of the lineup, Lin fearlessly took control of the basketball and the ballclub, almost immediately making a group of players into a team and reviving one of the NBAs flagship franchisesone that had been on life support for years. The phenomenon of Linsanity was born.

Heres a quick look at the numbers. Through his first twenty-three games on the Knicks bench, Jeremy Lin played a total of fifty-five minutes. Then, on February 4, he came off the bench against the New Jersey Nets to score twenty-five points, while adding five rebounds and seven assists to lead the Knicks to a 9992 victory. Given a start against the Utah Jazz (after his big night against New Jersey), he promptly showed that the first game wasnt a fluke, scoring twenty-eight points and adding eight assists as the Knicks won again. Two days later, against the Washington Wizards, it was twenty-three points and ten assists. Then he really exploded, scoring thirty-eight points with seven assists as the Knicks beat Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers. The story was becoming more improbable by the day. With the media beginning to swarm, people were taking notice and wondering just who Jeremy Lin really was.

Not only did Lin have the Knicks winning and Madison Square Garden jumping again, he was doing things that hadnt been done in a long time. His eighty-nine, 109, and 136 total points after his first three, four, and five career starts, respectively, represented the most by any player since the NBA/ABA merger in 197677. He also became the first NBA player to score at least twenty points and add seven or more assists in each of his first four starts. After his fourth start, and the teams fifth straight win, he was named the Eastern Conference Player of the Week, which he promptly followed by hitting a game-winning, last-second three-pointer against the Toronto Raptors with less than a second remaining on the clock, and bringing his team back from a seventeen point deficit. When he had a career-high thirteen assists in the next game against the Sacramento Kings, the Knicks had won seven straight and were back to .500 with a record of 1515. By that time, everybody in the sporting world wanted to know more about Jeremy Lin and how his obvious talent could have gone unnoticed for so long.

But that still wasnt all. A confluence of circumstances that led to the widespread Linsanity that was, by now, sweeping the NBA and crossing over into other areas of the sports and sociological worlds. Before Jeremy Lin got his chance, the Knicks were not winning and Madison Square Garden, long known as the Mecca of Basketball, lacked any form of life. Fans still came out, but their expectations were definitely not highat least not until Mike DAntoni put the basketball in Jeremy Lins hands. Suddenly, the Garden was again the place to be with loud, boisterous crowds and a gaggle of celebrities watching and socializing at each game. The print and broadcast media could not get enough of the story and those in the know said that Lins play had not only kept him from being cut, but he may very well have saved Coach DAntonis job, too. For sheer drama complete with media, it couldnt have happened in a better place than New York.

The timing of Lins arrival couldnt have been better for the entire league. Prior to the season, the NBA owners had locked the players out over a protracted attempt to get a new agreement between the owners and the Players Association. The league, which had just come off of a successful season, suddenly had to deal with a never-ending spate of negative publicity. Fans viewed both the players and owners as greedy millionaires (or, in the owners cases, billionaires), who were trying to squeeze the last dollar from each other. Negotiations were contentious and often downright mean-spirited. When the lockout was finally lifted and a new agreement was put in place, the league had to put together a compressed, sixty-six-game season. There was much grumbling among the players, a rash of injuries due to the limited practice time, and star players looking to be traded to bigger markets a la LeBron James, who had moved from Cleveland to Miami the season before. It was the rise of Jeremy Lin that made the NBA alive and once again relevant in what, to that time, had been a mostly desultory season.

Throughout the Lin-led Knicks win streak, more and more information began to emerge about the 63 point guard out of Harvard who had been unceremoniously cut by both the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets in short order before he was claimed by the Knicks, essentially signed to be just another warm body at the end of the bench until a couple of players returned from injury. In fact, shortly before his unexpected emergence, he had been sent down to the Erie Bay Hawks of the NBA D-League,a kind of minor league for players still not quite good enough for the NBA.

What made Lins story more interesting and, ultimately, marketable was his ethnicity. His parents had come to the United States from Taiwan and, while he was born in California, his Asian American heritage made him a source of pride to many Asian countries, including Chinaa prime target of the NBAs worldwide marketing effort. Ivy League graduates in the NBA were already a rare enough commodity, but Asian Americans were even rarer, giving more grist to the marketing and publicity mills. Also, his name lent itself to various puns, beginning with