Even a loss last Friday couldn’t halt the Linsanity. Against the New Orleans Hornets, point guard sensation Jeremy Lin recorded 26 points, and his team, the New York Knicks, bounced back on Sunday to defeat the Dallas Mavericks and keep the revival going. This Cinderella story seems to have had such an impact on the sports world that the news has even reached across the Atlantic, and even I feel I should join the party and write about it.

 

Last week, my esteemed fellow sportswriter — and, as ex-managing editor of sports here at The Daily, technically my former boss — Miles Bennett-Smith beat me to it, composing a ballad in sorrow at Stanford’s failure to recruit and nurture a talented player who grew up on its doorstep.

 

This seems to be a recurrent theme. Throughout Lin’s struggling career, he was repeatedly passed over by the good and the great of basketball. Even Bill Holden, the former assistant Harvard basketball coach who recruited Lin, didn’t immediately go for him. New York didn’t consider him as much more than a backup buried deep on the bench until head coach Mike D’Antoni, frustrated at how badly his team was playing, took a chance.

 

From knowing and caring relatively little about him just a few weeks ago, the basketball world is now struggling to understand both how good Lin may be and how he seems to have slipped through the recruitment net. His statistics in the nine games since being given that opportunity on Feb. 2 seem pretty phenomenal: an average of 25.0 points and 9.2 assists — though with 5.9 turnovers — per game.

 

Glancing at the NBA’s career scoring and assists leaders gives some idea of how impressive this start is. In his career, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar set a record with 38,387 total points, averaging 24.6 points per game (PPG). Karl Malone, second on the career scoring list, recorded 25.0 PPG, and Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain both averaged 30.1 on a nightly basis. With regards to assists, John Stockton dished out a career total of 15,806, with an average of 10.5 per game, followed by Jason Kidd’s 9.1 and Mark Jackson’s 8.0.

 

Extrapolating from nine games to careers measured in the thousands is, of course, a little bit of a leap. But even still, there aren’t many players who have ever been able to boast a streak of this nature. It seems hard to imagine that Lin will ever be considered a backup, fringe player again.

 

But how did this happen? How was the existence of a potential NBA legend completely missed by almost all of the hundreds of D-I basketball programs, the 32 professional teams and the hoards of scouts and sports journalists?

 

Maybe it wasn’t.

 

I’m not stupid enough to try and claim that Lin doesn’t have a clear talent for the game, but I’m not so sure that there isn’t something unique about his current situation that has triggered the exact nature of his explosion onto the scene. At least in the first few games, Lin was an unknown quantity to opposing players, and the hype that now surrounds him probably hasn’t helped dispel the mystique. Perhaps foes haven’t quite managed to understand how to counter his playing style.

 

Having come so close to the obscurity of a career that faltered even before it got started, Lin also must step out onto court with a unique attitude. It is hard to imagine that anyone in professional basketball is having quite as much fun right now; a seemingly failed ambition has become a dream come true. In that very first real chance, too, he must have known that this was it, his very last chance to make it.

 

Perhaps this gives Lin an edge that the more traditional journey of a fledgling star doesn’t yield. Maybe he wasn’t such a complete player back then, but that the tough experience he went through filled in any holes; maybe if he had been picked up by Stanford or even a traditional basketball school he wouldn’t been the sensation he now is. It might be that the scouts were, back then, right to pass over him, or that the recruiting and coaching systems we have in place fail to both pick up and develop unique talents like Lin’s.

 

Whatever, hindsight is both a wonderful and a futile thing. The Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets might be ruing the decision not to keep hold of him, but we need to forget the might-have-beens. More than anything, this is an inspiring and enthralling story. Time to just sit back and enjoy the ride.

 

Tom Taylor and Miles Bennett-Smith are currently holed up in a Tahoe cabin, discussing the wonders of Jeremy Lin and singing Tim Tebow lullabies. You can reach The Daily’s favorite Englishman at tom.taylor “at” stanford.edu.