Linsanity.

I think by now we have all heard about the Linsanity that is Jeremy Lin. If you have not you must not have turned on sportscentre in the past three weeks and thus will not find this blog to be of any relevance to you. Jeremy Lin is of course the 6’3, 200lb undrafted point guard for the New York Knicks who has taken the league by storm. Lin’s story starts when he was an unheralded high school player that was not recruited to play division one basketball. He ended up playing or Harvard and amassed a pretty solid career while at Harvard, and also had a very strong performance against a number 12 ranked Uconn Huskies which started to get people to notice him. His solid college career was not enough though to get him drafted into the NBA as every team passed on him, because of various reasons from lack of explosion off the dribble to not being strong enough to guard the bigger stronger athletes in the league. Lin was offered some summer league opportunities that landed him on the bench of such teams as the Golden State Warriors and the Houston Rockets who then placed Lin on waivers. The story gets interesting on December 27^th when the Knicks claimed Lin off the waiver wire because of injuries to their point guards. Lin still was not getting much playing time until the Knicks blew a lead to the Celtics and coach Mike D’antoni decided that it couldn’t hurt to insert the young point guard in the rotation to try and give his team a spark. What has happened from that night has truly been spectacular; Lin has gone on to torch the Lakers for 38 points. He put up 25 points against a top three point guard in the league in Deron Williams, he has been named eastern conference player of the week and played in the rookie sophomore game over all star weekend. I think all the doubters have subsided and some of the hype as well, people believe that he is the real deal and will be in the league for a while. It is just so surprising from which the circumstances that he comes from, that had people doubting him. I mean undrafted players from Harvard do not just enter the league and start single handedly tearing teams apart; it truly is something out of movie. It does appear though as Linsanity is hear to stay, as I write this he just went against potential rookie of the year winner Kyrie Irving and finished with 19 points, 13 assists, and no turnovers which have plagued him all season. Looks like the NBA has a story similar to NFL with the emergence of Tebow as a superstar, except with the fact that Jeremy Lin can pass the ball and doesn’t suck.