Tonight, the New York Knicks' miraculous streak of winning seven-straight games with Jeremy Lin as the starting point guard came to an end. What's worse is that it ended to the worst team in the Western Conferance, the New Orleans Hornets. Jeremy Lin has put on quite the show up to this point and some may be questioning whether this is the beginning of the end for Linsanity.
Before Jeremy Lin became a household name, I was quite surprised that he got very little respect from the NBA scouts. During my years at BC I was extremely impressed with Lin's play. He was the one player I knew of when Harvard began winning its annual basketball contests against Boston College. For the people criticizing BC for losing to Harvard multiple years in a row, I had always thought, "Well BC should win these games, but that Jeremy Lin can play." It shocked me that after graduation he ended as a D-Leaguer that got virtually no credit as a possible NBA prospect. I had seen Lin play in person well-before Linsanity and was quite impressed with his level of play. While Boston College's final years with Skinner were not great, BC certainly had some talented players on its roster when it matched up against Lin including Tyrese Rice and Reggie Jackson. Nonetheless, Lin held his own and was a dominant player for the Harvard Crimson. Of course, nobody, not even Tommy Amaker, could have anticipated this degree of success in the NBA.
What is the likelihood of Jeremy Lin continuing to impress? This question is obviously impossible to accurately predict. However, I think it is fair to say that Lin is a very good basketball player. You cannot take a team from being among the worst in the Eastern Conference to win seven straight if you do not have NBA talent. Lin is a good player and I certainly don't think Linsanity will over to the extent that he will become an unmarketable player any time soon. That being said even the hype of Linsanity really isn't that big when we put it into perspective. Sure Jeremy Lin is the biggest story of the NBA this year, but he is nowhere near at the top of the NBA in terms of talent. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, he is a very good NBA player and that is it. Many teams would love to have a player like Lin on their roster, but Lin is not even the best player on the Knicks. He still has a long way to go before he can put him in the caliber of players like Carmelo Anthony and Amar'e Stoudemire. To put this into perspective, even his immense following on twitter has him over a million followers short of young NBA-star Kevin Durant.
Nonetheless, the excitement behind Jeremy Lin's rise in the NBA has definitely generated a level of excitement that I hope continues.
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