For 50 glorious days in February and March, a fad swept the nation and engulfed sportswriters and SEO enthusiasts in its wave of unstoppable magnetism. It was called Linsanity, and while it dominated the internet no one could escape stories about Jeremy Lin, the New York Knicks point guard who had unwittingly become a franchise savior. Jeremy Lin sleeps on a couch. Jeremy Lin was released by 37 teams. Jeremy Lin is Oscar Robertson. Jeremy Lin turns water into wine, was spontaneously birthed in the rafters of Madison Square Garden. Jeremy Lin graduated from Harvard, Yale AND Princeton. And, the inevitable: Is Jeremy Lin or Tim Tebow the better Christian athlete?
The equal and opposite reaction to what was one of the purest versions of an underdog story we’ve seen in the sports world in a long time is Lin’s virtual disappearance from the internet news cycle. Lin injured his knee in late March, and in an instant the underdog story had run its sine wave course.
So what do we make of Jeremy Lin now? Let’s start with numbers, because he is an athlete, after all. I think you’ll see, though, that Lin’s stats from his run as the Knicks’ starting point guard don’t tell us much about him or his story.
25 Starts, about 30.5% of a complete 82-game regular season. Subsequent statistics are based on those starts.
18.2 points per game. Lin averaged 22.1 ppg in February, which tumbled to 14.6 ppg in March.
7.4 assists per game
2.0 steals per game
4.7 turnovers per game
15-10. Knicks record during Lin’s games as a starter, a .600 winning rate. Without Lin as a starter, the Knicks were 21-20, a .525 rate.
What does this tell us? Not much, really. It does give us a more appropriate lens through which to view the way Linsanity was covered, though, which should tell us something about how we consume sports generally. How does one turn a backup point guard who came in and had a nice, 25-game run into an international phenomenon?
I’m not certain I have the answer exactly, but I think it has something to do with the fact that Jeremy Lin had – has – no discernibly negative personality traits (unless you consider religious rigorism a bad thing). That made it easy to present his story without caveats, without nuance, and it was easy to digest in a similar way. When Lin injured his knee, it was as though the Jeremy Lin who had ignited Linsanity was a different character, someone who will exist permanently in a shrink-wrapped package for us to remember years from now. Because the truth is that as human, Jeremy Lin can’t possibly continue to act infallibly, and if he did, it would eventually bore the rest of us to death.
When Linsanity officially became a phenomenon, I wrote about how the fawning internet explosion of Lin obscured his basketball abilities. That’s still true, since we still don’t know what sort of professional basketball player he’ll turn out to be. But now I think it’s apparent that Lin helps represent the new paradigm of newsmaking, one that relies on sharing and positive stories to encourage readership. No one really wanted Lin to complicate the Lin story, because it would have hurt the phenomenon. Ultimately, that’s bad for business. The old stereotype that negative news sells has been thrown out the window (or at least sent to time out) by sites like BuzzFeed, which bases its business on the notion that people like to share and look at simple, happy pictures.
In that respect, for the story’s sake it’s probably a good thing that Jeremy Lin’s season ended in injury. It sucks for Lin, obviously, but the simplicity of Linsanity has been preserved. Writers like the New York Daily News’ Frank Isola have already begun blazing a new, more critical path of Jeremy Lin coverage.
Hopefully Lin will have a long, lucrative career in the NBA, but what we knew as Linsanity is gone forever. It’s probably the destiny of any simple, happy story to die a quick death, but here at SportsOlogy, we’ll always have those 50 days in February and March 2012.
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Follow Anthony Schneck on Twitter: @AnthonyOlogy
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