Since the start of the last week or so, the one article that numerous people have asked me to write has been about Jeremy Lin. In and of itself, this speaks volumes because typically those requests never come in, especially from where many of these comments have originated. The burden that comes with writing one of these pieces towards the end of the initial explosion is that most of the angles and storylines have already been smothered to the point of mental exhaustion.

Luckily, there are a few points that merit comment and clarification.

First off, the beauty of the Jeremy Lin saga is that it is works on a wide variety of different levels.

Some people may see parallels to the Tim Tebow circumstance, yet the discrepancies between their two rises make all the difference here. First, Lin has been objectively great on the basketball floor since becoming a starter. Part of “Tebow Magic” was that it felt like the team often succeeded in spite of bad performances by him, even if only for three quarters of the game. In this case, Lin converts those who care about good basketball first and foremost. Beyond that, he is playing the game “the right way” by generally staying in control and actually playing his position in a way that parallels other people in the league. Lin is not a duck wearing sheep’s clothing and passing- he is playing the point guard position and doing it quite well. This underlying truth helps take many of those who are frustrated by the Tebow hysteria out of the equation since Jeremy’s play since becoming a starter has actually justified the hype. He has also performed fantastically in the pivotal junctures of games, with his Valentine’s Day game-winner against Toronto serving as yet another example.

Second, Lin has a different, more accessible version of the underdog story. Tebow has the leadership angle and the benefit of prominent detractors, but the whole league count as detractors for Lin. He came out of a school (Harvard) and conference (Ivy League) that have not produced many NBA players and even fewer that even made flash in the pan status in the bigs. Hell, Lin’s profile on DraftExpress, one of the best and most thorough draft sites on the Internet, contained one blog post before the pre-draft camps and a blurb on his performance at Portsmouth a few months before the 2010 Draft. The reason this attention never came for him as a prospect was partially because of the circumstances discussed above and partially because Lin did not have the physical profile of most NBA players. Despite generally being less married to the good/bad body scouting issues that have plagued the NFL and MLB scouting systems for years, NBA personnel folks still use the eyeball test far more than they should (say hello to Saer Sene and Gerald Green). Thanks to that and the new breed of NBA point guards being physical beasts like Russell Westbrook, John Wall and Derrick Rose, the less freakish guys get less attention. Again, Lin’s underdog status makes him hard to dislike and easy to root for.

Beyond that, we can get into escalating factors in the Linsanity like his race and where he plays. Does Lin being an Asian-American matter in all of this? Absolutely. Whether we like to admit it or not, some (not all) people connect with others, athletes or otherwise, partially based on where they are from or what they look like. This can show itself in huge phone support for a local kid making it far on American Idol or Yao Ming’s All-Star votes. It happens. Even though the decisions appear to have been made on basketball reasons entirely, it is interesting to note that each of the NBA cities where Lin has played (San Francisco Bay Area, Houston, New York City) has a large Asian community and the one that nearly traded for him most recently, Toronto, does as well. 

The fact that Lin plays in New York ratchets things up a few million degrees too. For years, I underrated New York City as a basketball town mostly because I lived on the West Coast and had not experienced it in person. In the summer of 2010, I attended a Yankees game at Yankee Stadium with two friends and we eventually got into a conversation with a few of the people in front of us. After a bit, it came out that I wrote about basketball and suddenly people from all angles were asking me about LeBron, Carmelo, and every other player under the sun during the middle of a Red Sox/Yankees game. The town wanted the Knicks to be good more than I had ever imagined. As such, any glimmer of hope, especially in an otherwise gloomy year, gets them amped up more than just about anywhere else. Coupling it with the other factors and the echo chamber that is the mainstream sports media, you have the makings of a bona fide phenomenon.

With all that said, part of what makes Linsanity so enjoyable is that Jeremy himself does not get in the way of the adulation. In 2010, I walked into my first-ever Media Day to see a far larger group of press than I expected for a Golden State Warriors Media Day. When I asked some of the more experienced media people in the room whether this was common, most laughed it off and said “No- that’s for Lin.”

Here it was: an undrafted free agent getting as much attention as Stephen Curry and Monta Ellis despite never playing in an NBA game and never winning a game in the NCAA Tournament (the last time Harvard made the NCAA Tournament was 1946 and the NIT was about at the same level as the NCAA’s then). Despite all that, Lin handled the attention and the workload of trying to earn his spot on an NBA team with the dedication and humility that plenty of other professional athletes could learn from. Having spoken with him a few times over the course of last season, he was always polite, direct, and carried himself in a way that showed he had a good head on his shoulders.

The other major question that gets asked is whether he can keep this up. I’m not exactly sure what “this” is since what he has done over the last week and a half is unprecedented for a new NBA starter, much less one with his background. Even with that, his quick first step and willingness to either make the pass or take the shot should keep him in the league in some form for quite a long time regardless of the niche his game settles into once teams know how to defend what he brings to the floor.

Seeing him play last year, I wanted the Warriors to keep him deep on the roster (14^th man) and see what he turned into, yet these performances have surpassed any reasonable expectation I had by a ludicrous margin. Will he keep it up? No, because not many guys ever could and he does not need to in order to have a wonderful career in the best professional basketball league in the world.

What makes Linsanity special is that Lin the person, Lin the story, and Lin the player all fit together to make a cohesive narrative that can bring fans in from many directions without turning them away. While I doubt he can keep this level of productivity up for the long haul, he has the type of game that translates into many different roles in the league even if his stats take the reasonable step back over the weeks and months to come. My sincere hope in all of this is that fans and the media alike handle this with the perspective that Jeremy seems to have: enjoy the ride while it lasts and be ready for the hysteria to calm down eventually. After all, “we tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.” For now, we have Linsanity- let’s enjoy every second of it.