Linsanity

I adore him.

<I keep typing and deleting lengthy posts of what/why/how/blah blah blah>

Tell me a little!

I adore him too. Haven't caught an actual game yet, just been reading a lot and watching Youtube.

Hope to catch one soon.

I love how happy he is and how happy everyone around him is for him -- the congratulatory side-bump in the video above is almost as fun as the dunk itself.

I've heard his name a few times, some people are heavily impressed...not being a big follower of basketball it's left me somewhat lost. A friend of mine started babbling about him recently and mentioned Harvard and this that and the other. He's into basketball at all levels including college basketball which he also has been giving me daily updates on.
Since he was first brought to my attention I've seen a few of the sports update replays and even a few minutes of a game. He seems good...then again, I am neither tall nor swift on my feet or good at throwing things and getting them to land where I was hoping for. Maybe there'll be a few more televised chances for me to view his work.



According to the NY Times he was part of a win over the Raptors last night.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/sports/basketball/at-the-buzzer-its-all-jeremy-lin-as-knicks-edge-raptors.html?_r=1&hpw

TORONTO — The clock was running down — on the game, on the Knicks and on a mystical streak that was teetering on the edge of disappointment. The seconds kept disappearing until Jeremy Lin stopped his dribble, pulled up and launched another miracle.

The 3-point shot swished with a half-second remaining Tuesday night, lifting the Knicks to a 90-87 victory over the Toronto Raptors and setting off pandemonium at Air Canada Centre, where fans momentarily adopted the N.B.A.’s newest star as their own. Some 20,000 Canadians had just witnessed a growing legend.

So apparently the Raptors are a Canadian team. (told you I didn't know much about the sport)

He is apparently also the latest hit over in China

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/sports/basketball/in-china-knicks-lin-emerges-as-a-star-and-a-symbol.html?ref=world

HANGZHOU, China — The clearest sign that Jeremy Lin’s appeal has spanned the Pacific to mainland China may lie not in the 1.4 million Chinese microblog messages mentioning him in recent days, but in a rare failure to meet demand here in the heart of one of the world’s largest centers of pirated garment manufacturing.

His jerseys have sold out, even including the counterfeit ones,” said Zheng Xiaojun, a 24-year-old clerk here in the capital of Zhejiang province, near Shanghai.

Lin’s stunning success with the Knicks over the last week and a half has captured the imagination of the Chinese, from Communist Party bosses to the often-persecuted Christian minority. He has been particularly popular here in northern Zhejiang province, from which his maternal grandmother fled to Taiwan in the last days of China’s civil war in the late 1940s.

Lin is commonly described in the United States as Taiwanese-American because his parents grew up in Taiwan before moving to the United States, where Lin was born. But mainland China is already starting to claim him as its own, part of an incessant rivalry across the Taiwan Strait.

I hope his success continues, he stays with the Knicks and that he stays well focused.

Hopefully this will lead the Knicks to a winning season and a few more to come.

Great name for sportswriters.

Linning streak

The biggest thing about him is that he's the classic benchwarmer. He just started actually getting playing time for the Knicks because they were missing some of their best guys.

The season's been going for a while but he only started really playing a couple of weeks ago. edit: 11 days ago!

So it's not how good he is in a vacuum, really -- there are better players. It's that he's stepped up out of nowhere and not only is he good, he's actually leading the team.

Plus he's Asian (very few in the NBA), plus he's short for the NBA at 6' 3". (That's what was extra-fun about the dunk. I loved it when Spud Webb would dunk, too.)

Video of the game-winning three-pointer last night:



I didn't actually know about this when I started this topic! (We get NYT delivery, game happened too late to be in today's edition.)

Holy moly.

Thank you, these are parts about him I did not know. As I've indicated I'm not too familiar with basketball. When his name began popping up all over the place my thought was that he must have been playing in every game, never occurred to me is was sitting on the side waiting until he was needed. It's a good thing he's with the Knicks or I might have missed him entirely.

Football, baseball, hockey, bowling I get and understand, never have managed to figure basketball out. Maybe it was that incident on Warren Street when the basketball hit me on the head. As an impressionable 13 year old at the time, it seemed to be a warning to me to avoid the sport. It also seemed to be a sign to exit that school, which I did very soon after.

Again, thank you for the additional information.


Edit/Update: That video actually moved me. I was impressed and oddly interested in seeing the replay of it. Could this be the new me? A basketball fan at this stage of life?

You're welcome!

The other thing is that the Knicks have been fairly crappy this year, and Lin's been an integral part of a six-game winning streak. (They're now 14-15, so they had been 8-15 before he got going.)

Why not?

Here's more, a brief recap of the whole game:

http://www.nba.com/video/games/raptors/2012/02/14/0021100420_nyk_tor_recap.nba/

(Can't embed, or at least if I can not sure how.)

One thing I didn't really realize before is that not only did he sink the winning three-pointer, but he'd scored three points to tie it up right before that, too. (He was fouled making a lay-up that went in, then sunk the free throw.)

he'll never catch on until he starts Linbowing, after each basket he could bend over backwards and pray

yeah, and of course another aspect of this rags-to-riches story is that he went to Harvard...not known to be a basketball power, to say the least.

He does turn the ball over too much still as he learns on the fly how to be a legit point guard, but he's definitely a scorer to be reckoned with...for his team. Reality is that as the Knicks get their 2 big stars (Stoudamire and Carmello) to return to the lineup and share the ball with him...but this story won't fade away in a week or two. It could be that this is a legit trend...maybe not a blip.

Stoudamire's back, he was in the game last night. (The NBA highlight video shows one super-nifty pass from Lin to Stoudamire resulting in a dunk with nobody around.)

thanks for the update. I didn't see the game or the score sheet of last night's game - just some select highlights.

It makes you chuckle to think that he was so unsure of his tenure that he was sleeping on the couch of one of his teammates for temp housing.

that was actually part of the big story here in t.o. Big Chinese Christian community here, and they're all over Linsanity. First sell-out game here in a while.

Whee!

(In addition to the obvious scoring stuff, loved that no-look pass.)

totally love his passing skills (or what I've seen of them)

I work with a couple of young Chinese-Canadians, extremely Christian and madly into ultra and extreme sports. They've been force-feeding me the Jeremy Lin deets since they got wind of him.

One of the things I particularly like is the "oh yeahhh, this feels good" vibe that pours off of him.

in case, anyone thinks that he's appreciated only by the sports media and/or NYC and Knicks fans, last night on the road in Toronto, the Raptors fans gave him a standing ovation...after tieing and then crushing their team with a 3-pointer in the last seconds of the game.

he's got the mad skills, and you know he's wicked smaht...