Where Once Linsanity Raged<\/p>\n
Today former Houston Rocket Jeremy Lin announced his retirement from professional basketball at 37 years old. He\u2019d been out of the NBA since the 2018-19 season. Not because he\u2019d lost any skill, but in my opinion because injuries had robbed him of the speed, power and reckless attacking explosiveness that characterized his game at its best.<\/p>\n
His last season came with the New Taipei Kings, in a championship season (Taipei, Taiwan, being the rare example of a city that has a \u201cNew\u201d version of itself not on another continent (eg New York), but literally next door).<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t normally write about the retirements of Rockets who only played 2 seasons with the Rockets (2012-13, 2013-14) but Jeremy Lin was a player who brought his own online, often vociferous, fans with him to The Dreamshake, so much so that LOF – Lin Only Fan because a term we use for other such players (Chris Paul, Alperen Sengun) that have fans that Rockets fans here might reasonably expect to depart if and when that player does. A few might come to like the Rockets, and stick around, many won\u2019t.<\/p>\n
I think it\u2019s important to note Lin\u2019s retirement because of how important he was to a lot of people who\u2019d never seen an NBA player who looked like them. You might say \u201cYao Ming\u201d, but Yao, for all the ways I liked Yao (his dry humor went over the heads of most people covering him, I think) was the son of two Chinese national team basketball players. He was literally born to play basketball in a real sense.<\/p>\n
Jeremy Lin was different. He wasn\u2019t astonishingly tall, but just kind of tall, at 6\u20193\u201d. There are a ton of people in the world who are 6\u20193\u201d and overwhelmingly those people won\u2019t get paid to play basketball. If you\u2019re over 7ft tall, your chances of getting paid something to play basketball, somewhere, are good. But that\u2019s not all that made Lin an unlikely player. Frankly, guys under 7ft tall from east Asian just didn\u2019t play in the NBA. The opportunity to do so may be different and better now. If it\u2019s different, it\u2019s because of Jeremy Lin.<\/p>\n
But Lin was different in other ways. He was a very specific vision of the perfect son of immigrant parents. He got into Harvard, but not to play basketball, or any other sport. He was a walk on for Harvard. Somehow, though, he managed not only to fulfill that dream, but his own. He overcame a lot of obstacles, and not only made it to the NBA (partly by way of the great spotter of offensive talent, Mike D\u2019Antoni.) but stuck around for 9 seasons.<\/p>\n
When he got to the NBA, he defied stereotypes (if anyone was paying attention and not just launching a narrative sight unseen). He wasn\u2019t crafty, or shrewd, or guileful when he played. Lin was a high speed battering ram aimed the basket. Long ago I wrote an article here to help people see Lin\u2019s game as it was. Measurements of his size, speed, and weight matched almost perfectly those of an NFL player emblematic of the Seattle Seahawks famed \u201cLegion of Boom\u201d, Cam Chancellor. Ultimately it was Jeremy Lin\u2019s \u201cLegion of Boom\u201d style of play that shortened his NBA career. When he played, he was at least a bench scoring guard. But he more often just didn\u2019t play, due to injury. Except for the Rockets, where he played 82 and 71 games and was only really supplanted by James Harden.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s worth mentioning that here, at this site, it was very clear than Jeremy Lin wasn\u2019t just an NBA player, he was a heart throb, an ideal boyfriend. This, given the typical demographics of this site, was a novelty.<\/p>\n
Daryl Morey invented a strange, later outlawed, \u201cpoison pill\u201d contract to sign him away from the Knicks. Jeremy Lin averaged 14pts\/3rbs\/6ast\/1.4stl in 30 minutes a game for the Rockets over two seasons. His impact on the game, and on a personal level, The Dreamshake, went well beyond the boxscore. I wish him well in his future endeavors.<\/p>\n