What happened to Jeremy Lin?

Dear Sports Fan,

What happened to our incredible Jeremy Lin? What is he up to these days?

Thanks,
Jeehae

Dear Jeehae,

Jeremy Lin is still chugging along, playing basketball in the National Basketball Association (NBA), currently with the Los Angeles Lakers. He’s a solid NBA player but has never regained the spectacular play that made him a cultural phenomenon in 2012 when he played with the New York Knicks. Those crazy days of stardom which came to be known as “Linsanity” are now just a memory to be treasured or deconstructed.

For those of us who don’t remember or who never really knew what Linsanity was all about, here’s a short recap. At the start of 2012, Jeremy Lin was one of the dozens of people hovering around the fringes of NBA teams, good enough to have been signed by a team but not quite good enough to be a regular member of that team. Lin played his college basketball at Harvard where he played for four years and grew as a player each year. In his senior season, Lin was voted unanimously to the All-Ivy League First Team and received several other college honors as well. All-Ivy League First team is great, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into having a professional career. The Ivy League is a much weaker conference than the conferences most prospective NBA players play in. Indeed, Lin was not drafted by any of the 30 teams in the 2010 NBA draft but, after a decent showing in the NBA’s summer league, he was signed to a two-year contract by the Golden State Warriors. This seemed like a great fin. The Warriors were Lin’s favorite team, having grown up nearby, and as the first Chinese or Taiwanese-American player in the NBA, Lin was disproportionately popular for an unheralded rookie, especially among the Warriors already large Asian-American fan base. After one year with the Warriors, Lin was waived or released from the team. This isn’t unusual for a player of his stature in the league, and Lin wouldn’t have to wait long for a second and third chance. The first team to pick him up was the Houston Rockets but Lin could not break through the three more established players that team already had at his position. The Rockets cut him as well. After several weeks without a team, the New York Knicks claimed Lin.

Even though the New York Knicks signed Lin, he was no sure thing to succeed there, or even to play. He needed a little bit of luck just to get onto the court. He found that luck in January, after a particularly bad game from the Knicks starters prompted then Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni to turn to Lin in desperation (and perhaps to instill some competitive fear in the rest of the team.) Lin took off. For a couple weeks, it seemed like he could do no wrong on the basketball court. He set records for performance in his first handful of starts. He averaged over 20 points and seven assists in his first five games and made a couple memorable buzzer beaters. Lin got famous in a hurry. After the season was over, the Knicks were expected to give a long term contract to their new most popular player. It wasn’t meant to be. Lin was a restricted free agent, which means other teams were able to make contract offers to him, but the Knicks could match their offers and keep Lin if they wanted. The Houston Rockets, perhaps feeling regret over having had Lin on their team and then releasing him, made Lin an offer he couldn’t refuse and the Knicks couldn’t match. All of a sudden, Lin was a Rocket and Linsanity in New York was just a memory.

Since then, the Knicks have never recaptured the city or the world’s attention the way they had it when Lin was a thing, nor have they been very successful as a basketball team. Lin too has never been as good as he was in those first days in New York. He struggled for two seasons in Houston before being traded to Los Angeles in a move that was more about Houston releasing themselves from the financial obligation of paying him than it was about basketball. In Los Angeles this year, Lin has been a part of one of the worst teams in the league. Still, he’s in the NBA and shows no signs of leaving, which is actually more of an achievement than you might think. The NBA is an amazingly shallow league — there simply aren’t that many jobs for basketball players and each year between 30 and 60 new, young, players come out of college or Europe to compete for jobs. Lin should be proud of simply staying in the league.

How should we evaluate Linsanity with the benefit of hindsight? It was truly a remarkable performance from a relatively unknown player but the phenomenon of Linsanity was also aided by two important factors: Lin’s unique backstory as the first Asian-American NBA player and the fact that he was playing for the New York Knicks, a marquee franchise because of its history and location. Streaks of impressive play by newcomers do happen. Any player who is skilled enough to make the NBA is skilled enough to put together a string of seemingly unlikely statistical performances but they don’t always become cultural stars. A good comparison is the case of Hasaan Whiteside. Whiteside was almost a complete unknown before this year. He had played college basketball at Marshall University in West Virginia and, unlike Lin, was actually drafted by an NBA team. Before long though, he was out of the league and played in the NBA Development League, Lebanon, and China, before being welcomed back into the NBA by the Miami Heat. When he broke into their lineup this January, he quickly became a basketball revelation of similar proportions to Lin. Whiteside is an athletic seven-foot tall player who puts up remarkable scoring, rebounding, and blocking statistics. As famous as he rapidly became in basketball circles, he never broke out of the sports section and onto the news pages. Whiteside is not notable from a personal interest or historical standpoint and Miami, without LeBron James to make them notorious, is not as interesting a team as the New York Knicks are (even when they’re terrible.)

Linsanity was a special time and Lin is a good NBA player but he’ll probably never be as good again as he was in his first games with the Knicks.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer