Jeremy Lin: the Anatomy of a Phenomenon
It's effective so far, but it's not entirely Lin's doing in the same way Rubio and Kyrie take full responsibility for their incredible passes. In the D'Antoni system players drill heavily on how to trick defenses into getting them open. Players in a D'Antoni offense tend to be more open than players on any other type of offense with the possible exception of the current twilight Spurs for that very reason -- it's by design. His passes aren't on target, necessarily, nor are they as fluidly attuned to the motion of his shooter. But they're the right passes in the macro sense of his spur-of-the-moment choice, and in a good offense, that's all that really matters. Which is the real key, and the reason this is so odd to watch. The reason his passing is effective in the Knicks offense is rooted in something utterly unrelated to his schooling, and a talent that can't really be taught -- it's the split-second decisionmaking. Utterly disparate from intelligence, his degree, his background, et cetera. It's rooted in his ability to make snap decisions. You don't really develop that from intellectual rigor, you develop that from hard work and twitch-trigger practice until you naturally attune yourself to making the right play.
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In short, his intelligence has little to do with it. It's instinct. Perseverance. That sort of thing. The players that tweet about it and talk about it seem to understand -- Kobe isn't a man who tends to stray far from the narrative, but he too understands the basic fact that Lin's talent has little to do with his schooling and everything to do with the work he put in to get his game up to par. The "Harvard" narrative is a lazy one from a lazy media conglomerate that adores lazy thinking. But Lin's play is certainly interesting, respectable, and as a rotation player in the NBA it looks quite sustainable. The thing that really confuses me, and gets me scratching my head is the heights to which he's soared in a single week.
After the game, I checked my Facebook -- twenty of my 469 friends had already posted something about Lin, and at least three of those twenty were people who I'd never seen watch a game of basketball in their life (and no, none of those three were asian). There's something about Lin that's galvanizing to those who watch him, some special aspect that pervades his play and allows him to rise from his status as a human being into a concept. A physical manifestation of hope. The Obama of hoopin'. After all. It wasn't just the Facebook bomb I saw when I checked my feed. It was the litany of athletes (Tiago Splitter, Steve Nash, Manu Ginobili, Danny Green, Kobe Bryant, David Robinson, and many others) who are talking about him. With David Robinson -- a man who still goes to tons of Spurs games and stays involved in the organization -- openly stating that Lin has supplanted any Spur as his favorite NBA player. What the hell are we watching? I don't really know. It's Lin's world, we're living in it, and I know for certain I'll be watching this a lot closer going forward.
I'm so glad this season exists.
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djbtak:
February 11th, 2012 at 7:10 am
Great post. Lin's ability to play the angles, and his lack of feel for some of the finer points of playing with others are both easily attributable to his econ major. The trouble with IQ as a concept is that, like an economist, it evaluates many different kinds of thinking in a single scale. A lot of the popular narrative gets it wrong (in an obviously racialized way) by saying Lin plays great team ball and is a student of the game. Actually, Lin has good court vision, excellent handles, a respectable jump shot (unlike Rubio) and, as Hubie pointed out consistently on the ESPN feed, the body to handle the NBA game. Stereotyping is inevitable, but the right stereotype is the technician/technocrat rather than the "under-talented guy who makes his team better" usually reserved for white guys. But the morally uplifting narrative is all the commentators seem to be able to run with.
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