Tierica Williams Jeremy Lin: "Linsanity"

Jeremy Lin certainly made history with being one of the few Asian Americans in NBA history. He is the first American of Chinese descent to play in the league. I still member back from 2012 when he was the talk of NBA. It’s like he came right out of the woodwork. I had no idea who this guy was. Going into high school (about 5 years ago) I have always tuned in and watched the NBA draft, and when Jeremy Lin was the talk of NBA I still had no idea who he was because I did not remember him getting draft until I later discovered he was undrafted and wasn’t picked by a NBA team in the 2010 NBA draft. 

  I did not pay too much attention to him until I no longer was unable to ignore the “Jeremy Lin” buzz and how good of a player he was when he played for the New York Knicks. He was all over twitter, Facebook, ESPN and was all the boys in high school talked about. There was absolutely no way you could ignore it. I guess this is when “Linsanity” came into effect.

When Jeremy Lin played for the New York Knicks, I always tuned into his interviews and post-game interviews and it appeared that he didn’t like all of the fame and attention he was receiving. Even when he went to play for the Los Angeles Lakers, he wanted the whole “Linsanity” thing to be put behind him. The day of his contract signing to Los Angeles during his press conference he quoted “I’ve been over Linsanity. I’m ready for the upcoming season. For me, Linsanity’s more like a one-off thing. It’s a short duration of time. I’m really looking to build a legacy, a long-term thing in terms of who I am as a person, who I am as a player. It’s kind of irritating to always be referred to as something of the past or some short time of the past or something like that. I think I want to just continue to build who I am as a player”-Jeremy Lin; (Howard-Cooper, 2014, para. 7). (http://hangtime.blogs.nba.com/2014/10/02/trying-to-put-linsanity-in-the-past/)

I guess the media hyped his name up so much and set so many high standards for him that he know he’s not able to live up to just yet which is why he wants to put the whole “Linsanity” thing to rest. He knows career wise he has a lot more work to do. I say this because while playing with the New York Knicks he was averaging 20-30 points. Now he’s averaging only 11 points a game with the Lakers, and was only averaging about 12 points with the Houston Rockets.

The success he experienced with the New York Knicks was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. He’s a good player, but he still has a long way to go from being one of the “greatest”.