From NBA.com. A recap of Jeremy Lin's incredible emergence as a star for the NY Knicks.
"Players playing that well don't usually come out of nowhere. It seems like they come out of nowhere, but if you can go back and take a look, his skill level was probably there from the beginning. It probably just went unnoticed."
-Kobe Bryant to Jeremy Lin after scoring 38pts on Lakers.
Why did he go
unnoticed?
When you take a look at his track record, he led Palo Alto High School to 32-1 record and a CIF state title over nationally ranked Mater Dei High as a senior. He was a first team All-State selection and the Northern California Division II Player of the Year among several other accolades.
Then he received no athletic scholarship offers. Not even Stanford, the school right there in Palo Alto, offered him nothing. Lin got zilch, nada. What did he end up doing? Well he went on to Harvard and was a three-time All-Ivy League performer. He was named one of the country’s 12 most versatile players by ESPN’s Fran Fraschilla among the likes of Evan Turner, Greg Monroe, Gordon Hayward, Paul George, all of whom were drafted in the top 10 of the 2010 NBA Draft. As a junior, he was the only player in the nation to rank among the top 10 in his conference in points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, field goal percentage, free percentage and three-point percentage. As a senior, he helped the Crimson to its most wins in a season in school history. He became the first player in Ivy League history to record at least 1,450 points, 450 rebounds, 400 assists and 200 steals. The list goes on and on.
Then he went undrafted, even after Jim Calhoun, the coach of the No. 12 UConn team who barely beat Harvard during Lin’s senior season, 79-73, said, “I’ve seen a lot of teams come through here, and he could play for any of them.” This after Lin dropped 30 points and pulled down nine rebounds in the losing effort. After a summer league stint with the Mavericks, he eventually signed with the Warriors, only to play in 29 games as a rookie. Lin was then waived by the Warriors and then by the Houston Rockets, before winding up with the Knickerbockers.
Even then the story is not complete. Just two weeks before his breakout game against the Nets, Lin recorded a triple-double for the Erie BayHawks in the D-League. Now four NBA starts later, he’s the first player in league history with at least 20 points and seven assists in his first career starts. His 109 points in those starts is the most by any player since the ABA-NBA merger (the guy scored 76 points all season as a rookie with Golden State!).
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