While hoops expert Floyd Mayweather considers Jeremy Lin the product of “hype” (“black players do what he does every night and don’t get the same praise”), Midwest Sports Fans’ Keith Mullet is equally skeptical about the Harvard-educated PG’s long term impact, suggesting that along with a number of other red flags (Mike D’Antoni being a lame duck, Carmelo Anthony being a selfish jerk), Lin simply isn’t that good. “Why did no one draft this guy? And why has it taken all this time for him to get on the court?” wonders Mullet, who places a tremendous amount of faith in the prognostication skills of basketball executives who made Kwame Brown, Nikoloz Tskitishvili and Joe Alexander first round picks.
I have to believe that the reason everyone passed on Jeremy Lin is that he really doesn’t have the necessary ability to start on an NBA team.
I know there are plenty of high profile draft busts and players who never pan out. NBA scouts and GMs aren’t infallible. But to think that not one GM thought this guy was good enough to draft has to say something about him, right?
I understand that Lin has had time to craft his game in Golden State and in the D-League. He’s certainly a better player now than he was coming out of Harvard. But let’s not forget that even the Knicks almost released Lin a few days before his recent explosion. Even D’Antoni didn’t predict this outburst. Which makes me think that this is just a hot streak against relatively weak competition.
Hot streaks always come to an end, and I’m afraid Jeremy Lin’s will follow suit.
If Lin beating the likes of Kobe Bryant and Ricky Rubio can be considered “weak competition”, can no allowances whatsoever be made for the fact he put the fucking team on his back? Denied the services of Carmelo Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire, Lin has won 5 straight with a supporting cast consisting of non-Springfield inductees Iman Shumpert, Steve Novak and Landry Fields. If wins over Golden State and Minnesota aren’t enough to convince you the Knicks are title contenders, that’s just as well. They’re not. But no one expected anything out of the point guard position this late in the year, and based on early returns, the otherwise mired-in-salary-cap-hell Knickerbockers have much more to look forward to than coaxing the defensively challenged Steve Nash into finishing his career at the Garden.