Where Once Linsanity Raged
Today former Houston Rocket Jeremy Lin announced his retirement from professional basketball at 37 years old. He’d been out of the NBA since the 2018-19 season. Not because he’d 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.
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 “New” version of itself not
on another continent (eg New York), but literally next door).
I don’t 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’t.
I think it’s important to note Lin’s retirement because of how important he was to a lot of people who’d never seen an NBA player who looked like them. You might say “Yao Ming”, but Yao, for all the ways I liked Yao (his dry humor went over the heads of most people covering him, I think) was literally the son of two Chinese national team basketball players. He was literally born to play basketball in a real sense.
Jeremy Lin was different. He wasn’t astonishingly tall, but just kind of tall, at 6’3”. There are a ton of people in the world who are 6’3” and overwhelmingly those people won’t get paid to play basketball. If you’re over 7ft tall, your chances of getting paid something to play basketball, somewhere, are good. But that’s not all that made Lin an unlikely player. Frankly, guys under 7ft tall from east Asian just didn’t play in the NBA. The opportunity to do so may be different and better now. If it’s different, it’s because of Jeremy Lin.
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 somehow made it to the NBA (partly by way of the great spotter of offensive talent, Mike D’Antoni.)
When he got to the NBA, he defied stereotypes (if anyone was paying attention). He wasn’t crafty, or shrewd, or guileful when he played. He was a high speed battering ram aimed the basket. Long ago I wrote an article here to help people see Lin’s game as it was. Measurements of his size, speed, and weight matched almost perfectly those of an NFL player emblematic of the Seattle Seahawks “Legion of Boom”, Cam Chancellor. Ultimately it was Jeremy Lin’s “Legion of Boom” 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’t play, due to injury.
It’s probably worth mentioned that here, at this site, it was very clear than Jeremy Lin wasn’t just an NBA player, he was a heart throb, an ideal boyfriend. This, given the typical demographics of this site, was a novelty.
Daryl Morey invented a strange, later outlawed, “poison pill” 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.
