LINSANE IN THE MEMBRANE

What do The Grateful Dead, Google and Jeremy Lin all have in common? If you say they are all unexpected success stories you would be right and if you said absolutely nothing you would be even more right. However the one thing that I first noticed about Jeremy Lin when he entered my stream of consciousness earlier this month is that he was born and raised in the hotbed of unconventional yet extreme talent, Palo Alto, California. Jeremy Lin is more than a point guard, more than an overnight success story, more that the cause of Gotham’s Temporary Linsanity and more than a new way to sell jerseys. In short he is the answer to a riddle - Can an unknown and undrafted 23 year old Harvard graduate restore the Knicks into a winning team? Before answering that consider the following. Can an unmotivated jug band formed in Palo Alto define the psychedelic rock movement and create a cult following for half a century? Can two men and a complicated algorithm change the way the world’s population searches for information, books flights, gets directions, keeps in touch with friends, watches videos, reads the news and makes phone calls? The great town of Palo Alto seems to breed these unusual suspects.

After 10 days of Linsanity I finally decided to actually watch a Knick game to see what the hype was all about. I was expecting to see a point guard of back up quality at best hit a few open shots and watch the crowd overreact simply because he does not look like anyone that has ever started in the NBA shorter than 7’6”. At 6’3” I expected to see a kid with no scouting report playing in a soon to end fantasy camp. I expected to see an outside shooting “HORSE” player with IVY league ball handling skills unable to guard the elite point guards of the NBA and unable to feed his co-stars efficiently. To be honest prior to watching him play I never thought of him as anything more than publicity stunt. Even when my wife asked me last week if the Knicks would keep him I answered “of course, he sells merchandise”.

What I actually witnessed in the game blew my mind. I first turned on the game in the second quarter when he was on the bench and had I not known better I would have thought he was the water boy or the trainer’s son sitting in uniform with all the players. Then he re-entered the game and impressed me in a way that the cynic in me didn’t see coming. Just as I predicted he doesn’t have the speed, he doesn’t have the size and he doesn’t have the finesse. He does however have court presence and the ability to distribute the ball efficiently. More importantly he has a skill that Knick point guards have not had for over a decade – he makes the players around him better. Their sudden 9-3 run makes sense to me – when he is on the floor the Knicks are quite simply the better team. Yes he turns the ball over and yes he can’t always go toe-to-toe with his counterparts. The most important thing for a team though is to win and he seems to bring a winning formula to the table. In making the individuals around him better he makes the team at large better and as their starting point guard the Knicks are a force in the East.

AND THATS THE BRUTAL TRUTH!