Lin-sanity!

Yup, I'm on the Jeremy Lin bandwagon... and proud to be!

In case you haven't heard the incredible story in the NBA over the last two weeks... it's about #17 pictured above. He's the son of immigrants from Taiwan, didn't get a college basketball scholarship out of high school so he went to Harvard where he was academically admitted and then joined the basketball team.... Prior to Lin's arrival at the school, Harvard suffered through seven straight losing seasons, that turned around while Lin was there and they made the NCAA tournament (Harvard's current success and Top 25 ranking is attributed to Lin's work there).

Despite his incredible work there, he went undrafted by the NBA but walked-on to the Golden State Warriors where he sat on the bench all season (a heck of an accomplishment in its own right). The Warriors released him at the end of last season and he was picked up by the New York Knicks... where he sat the bench. The Knicks were losing bad, with an 8-15 record and losing their third guard to injury and resorting to the last guy on the bench... Jeremy Lin. In the 9 games that he has played for the Knicks, they have been 8-1, pulling their record even to 16-16.

Prior to chance to play, Lin was sleeping on the couch in his brother's apartment in New York. Two weeks later, he has his own place in Trump Tower.

The story behind Jeremy Lin is incredible, but it's his style of play that excites me. It's clean. It's smart. It's just flat out great fundamental basketball. He does what he needs to do, when it needs to be done. He scored 38 points against Kobe Bryant one night, then dished out 14 assists against the reigning champion Mavericks another day.

Put the story and his style of play all together and you have an explosive situation. You can see people already wearing his jersey there in the picture above in New York City. Any idea what this is doing in China? Lin is going to make so much money in China that any NBA salary is irrelevant.

While I was getting my MBA in China a couple of years ago, I had to write a paper on how a multinational company adopted its business strategy in China. I chose the NBA and focused on the NBA-China operations. One of the interesting things I found was that as big as Yao Ming was in China, the kids on the basketball courts in China didn't identify with him. Yao Ming was 7'6" tall and his style of play was slow and deliberate. The youth in China identified more with other Houston Rocket players such as Tracy McGrady... upbeat and creative. But now in Jeremy Lin, you have the Chinese heritage, the style of play they can identify with, and now the HOPE that they too can one day become a basketball star without needing to be a freakish 7'6".

What can I say, I'm a Jeremy Lin fan. I've been turned off by the NBA for the past 10+ years. I was tired of Kobe Bryant's off-court issues, tired of LeBron James' quest for money. I didn't like his attempt to stack the deck in Miami and thought that it possibly could set a pattern that would completely ruin the game. I watched the NBA finals last year only to watch LeBron and company lose (thankfully they did!). But now I'm a fan again. Who knows what the rest of the season will bring, but it's been a heck of a two weeks to watch!