From Palo Alto to Madison Square Garden

This will be the last of sports blogs for the present; it's a positive story about basketball after complaints about football and baseball. 

It's a real "feel good" story to read of Jeremy Lin's back-to-back games for the New York Knicks, leading this team from the wilderness to consecutive wins depite the absense of their two top players.

When Jeremy was first signed by the Golden State Warriors as an undrafted player from Harvard, the prevailing wisdom was that the addition of an Ivy League star was because he was a local from Palo Alto High, he was the only Chinese-American in the NBA and it was good PR for a team with only marginal success.

He was twelfth player on a 12-man rooster and showed flashes of ability, but he only played in blowout losses as a rule. He bounced back and forth from the development league to Golden State all season long. 

It surprised no one when he was released at the start of this season, and no surprise that after a quick look, he was released by Houston. What was unusual was that the Knicks saw something in his game that led them to sign him but then relegate him to the end of their bench.

That is, until two games ago, when he came in, scored 25 points and led them to a win. In his next game, as a starter, he scored 28 and again New York won.

Newspaper reports suggest that the Knick's coach was amazed at what the slender point guard could do, but what this suggests is Jeremy's success at every level before was not a mirage, and his being in the NBA is anything but tokenism.