And that doesn't mean that he WON'T impress in the future. He could improve every year and become a 20 point, 10 assist player. nobody knows when a player will stop improving.
yes, but weren't you defending that post by showing the video where you thought Jeremy Lin is athletic? I'll concede and say Jeremy Lin is pretty athletic today.
There were/are a lot of Asian athletes in pro sports now: Yi Jian Lian, Wang Zhi Zhi, Ichiro, Hideki Matsui, Chan Ho Park, Hyun Jin Ryu, Yu Darvish, Michael Chang, Hiroki Kuroda, Koji Uehara, Haruki Nakamura, etc. Not all of them have big Asian American fan followings. Some of them have none at all. It's not just racial identification, though that plays a significant part. It's also their stories. Yao was really popular because he was the first Asian sports global star. His massive size was also a factor because it went against stereotypes of Asians as weak little people who could only play ping pong. Lin's story has been the biggest of all because his background and adversities mirror that of so many Asian Americans, regardless of whether they have athletic dreams or not. Many Asian Americans can relate to being "undrafted" in whatever field they're in because of racial stereotypes, or having to work much harder than others to be rewarded with less.
Gotcha - and you missed maybe the best example of a short (for NBA) player that could dunk who is known as being unathletic - Andre Miller.:grin:
Just because this is a fun read by Bill Simmons (in his Sports Guy column), ... it's not all about Lin being Asian. It never was. SG: And that’s been one of my favorite things about Linsanity. The Knicks were going to miss the playoffs; even worse, it was genuinely depressing to watch them. Offensively, they looked broken — two ball-stopping forwards, no point guard, no shooters — and their coach was sitting glumly on the sidelines with one of those vacant “please, fire me, I’m not man enough to quit” looks on his face. Their fans were slowly starting to panic about Carmelo’s crappy season, especially with Danilo Gallinari (whom they loved last year) emerging as a star in Denver. If that wasn’t bad enough, anyone who lived in New York couldn’t watch the team because the MSG Network disappeared from their cable systems. There was just a general plague hanging over the team. You could feel it. Especially when you went to the games. Stuck at 8-15 without Carmelo and Amar’e, you could say they were — unequivocally — at the do-or-die portion of their regular season. Then, Lin starts playing at point guard … and within a week, they’re acting like a 15-seed pulling off a March Madness upset (only game after game). And yeah, I know race is hanging over this story — sometimes that happens for phony reasons, sometimes it happens for real ones, and in this case, it’s real and should hang over it a little. But if Lin happened to be white or black, I’d like to think this story would be 85 percent as fun — it’s mostly about his style of play (wildly entertaining), the whole out-of-nowhere underdog thing (always our favorite type of story as sports fans), its effect on Knicks players and Knicks fans (basically, it’s turned both groups delirious) and the fact that it’s the Knicks (who have four generations of fans, play in our biggest market and needed a feel-good story more than just about any other team). You know what’s really amazing? That he saved the Knicks’ playoff hopes AND saved his coach’s job has almost been an afterthought.
Thanks for posting that - that's another thing that gets overlooked is that not only is he a good player, but a very entertaining player when he's on - another reason for his popularity. I guess the whole enchilada would be (in no particular order) Dramatic rise to prominence entertaining style of play has helped players around him play better Asian American humble religious underdog who persevered normal sized human (compared to Yao) did i miss any? once again, not a LOF - more like RLF (Rockets/Lin Fan) I feel like I have to keep saying this for the witch hunters.
Lin's story resonates with all people that have a dream. It's a great Horatio Alger story or a Cinderella story.
