But seriously, folks: is there any explanation for why Lin wasn't identified as a major basketball talent before a few weeks ago other than racial stereotyping?
The explanation I've read is that he wasn't a standout college player, and began as a bench player for several teams that were deep in his position (in a league that's deep in point guards, generally). When you're the fourth option at your position on the bench, it's hard to get a chance to shine. (And, again, without a heralded college career, no one realized they ought to be moving him up and giving him more of a chance.)
Does this suggest that talent identification in the NBA has serious imperfections? Yes, but that shouldn't be a surprise. (It's still far more of a meritocracy than most workplaces, of course.)
That just pushes the question back to "why was he a bench player" or "why wasn't he recruited for a serious college team"? Where my actual lack of knowledge about basketball comes in is that it's possible that there was nothing to miss -- that he wasn't that good until this year, and his game just improved immensely. But if that's not the case, someone missed something.
The description of him as crafty, humble, and hardworking totally cracked me up.
And, you know, he's only been in the league a year (again, on teams with plenty of PG options), so the fact that he hadn't previously been given that much of a chance isn't a complete surprise. It's not like he spent half a career as a bench player before being noticed.
And to the extent there's any stereotyping going on, I'd bet it's more anti-Ivy than racially-motivated. (Not that there can't be at least some of both.)
That's hardly the worst Jeremy Lin headline.
The explanation I've read is that he wasn't a standout college player
I'm not really sure what this means. He was a super popular, very well-known college player who kicked ass for a team that's not historically been very good at all.
What if heard is that his talents aren't terribly immediately obvious (he's not that tall and not that fast), and that he actually didn't do very well when the Wizards put him in (possibly because the intensity of the pressure got to him?) and they gave up too fast.
But it's pretty weird.
Anyhow, I'm curious to see what happens as people figure out how to deal with him.
2: the story as told by wikipedia*:
Lin sent his résumé and a DVD of highlights of his high school basketball career to all the Ivy League schools, University of California, Berkeley, and his dream schools Stanford and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).[18][19][7] The Pac-10 schools wanted him to walk-on, rather than be actively recruited or offered a sports scholarship. Harvard and Brown were the only teams that guaranteed him a spot on their basketball teams, but Ivy League schools do not offer athletic scholarships.[20] Rex Walters, University of San Francisco men's basketball coach and a retired NBA player, said NCAA limits on coaches' recruiting visits had an impact on Lin's chances. "Most colleges start recruiting a guy in the first five minutes they see him because he runs really fast, jumps really high, does the quick, easy thing to evaluate," Walters said. Lin added, "I just think in order for someone to understand my game, they have to watch me more than once, because I'm not going to do anything that's extra flashy or freakishly athletic."[21]
In July 2005, then-Harvard assistant coach Bill Holden saw that Lin was 6 feet 3 inches (1.91 m), which fit the physical attributes he was seeking, and he had a 4.2 grade point average in high school, which fit Harvard's academic standards. However, Holden was not initially impressed with Lin's on-court abilities, and told Lin's high school basketball coach, Peter Diepenbrock, that Lin was a "Division III player". Later that week, Holden saw Lin playing in a much more competitive game, driving to the basket at every opportunity with the "instincts of a killer". Lin became a top-priority for Holden.[22] Harvard coaches feared that Stanford, close to Lin's home,[note 2] would offer Lin a scholarship, but it did not, and Lin chose to attend Harvard.[23] "I wasn't sitting there saying all these Division I coaches were knuckleheads," Diepenbrock said. "There were legitimate questions about Jeremy."[24] Joe Lacob, incoming Warriors' owner and Stanford booster, said Stanford's failure to recruit Lin "was really stupid. The kid was right across the street. [If] you can't recognize that, you've got a problem."[25] Kerry Keating, the UCLA assistant who offered Lin the opportunity to walk-on, said in hindsight that Lin would probably have ended up starting at point guard for UCLA.[26]
* I'd love to know how different this looked a month ago.
I figure people probably discounted his college career because Harvard's not playing a lot of powerhouse teams (is this true? I honestly know absolutely nothing about any of this). So no matter how good he looked against Harvard's opponents, you could still believe that he wasn't really that good.
He was a super popular, very well-known college player who kicked ass for a team that's not historically been very good at all.
Right, that's what I mean. The last Harvard player in the NBA was Ed Smith in 1954.
I'll see if I can find the deep scouting report I read yesterday, I think. Stuff like high dribble, making him susceptible to steals (and he has a lot of turnovers now); not a good mid-range jumpshot, and hesitant about taking it. Overall, I think it was a net-positive assessment
But a) it isn't as if he didn't get a shot, and it says a lot that he made it to the NBA bench for years (very few do), b) he is helped by his coach's offensive system, and the opponent's unfamiliarity with him, and c) his teammates. Chandler is a support superstar, too bad Dallas couldn't afford to keep him (and they definitely couldn't.
But wins count. Lin is for real. For now. Let's see how he does in the playoffs.
7: yeah, I think that's right. Although he had monster games against BC and UConn.
I was rooting for a strike to kill the season, but if they have to play, I suppose they may as well have something nice to argue about besides money.
6: What you'd want to compare him to is some physically similar black or white kid -- a very good point-guard who wasn't remarkable for spectacular athleticism -- and see what happened to them recruiting-wise. Do excellent but unspectacular players generally get missed, and only discovered by accident during or after college, or are there methods for finding them that didn't work for Lin?
I'll be curious to see if this results in a lot more interest in Harvard players, since the team continues to be pretty good. There was an interesting article about the huge boon to sports the new Ivy League financial aid systems (full ride at harvard if your parents make less than $60k, steep discounting if they make less than $80k, cap going up every year) has really helped recruiting, even though they don't have athletic scholarships.
that he wasn't that good until this year
This is wrong. He's always clearly been "good"; what no one knew prior to recently was "how good"--how would he fare against very good competition? And there were reasons to be skeptical. (There still are. As bob and sifu said, scouting by opponents has only really just begun.)
a) it isn't as if he didn't get a shot, and it says a lot that he made it to the NBA bench for years (very few do)
This is an interesting point about people who get missed in any talent identification process: if you miss them completely, there's no way to know what happened or to talk about it. All your data-points are going to be near-misses.
There was also an interesting story about the most impressive high school female player ever, who left her college team after one semester so that she could be closer to her sister, who had some disabilities, I think. And now she's leading her Podunk U team to all kinds of victories.
Here it is, from Obsidian Wings
NBA Draft Analysis of Jeremy Lin
to all kinds of victories
It would have been more impressive if all the victories were kind where the score is 67 to 58.
Steve Sailer has had a few posts on this. Regarding Lin's Harvard career, starring in the Ivy League usually isn't enough to make it in the NBA. Regarding his previous NBA lack of success:
P.S. If you want to group Tebow and Lin, the real connection is that neither one is cut out to be a humble, team-first role player. Both need the ball in their hands all the time to do their thing. John Elway would have been very happy if Tebow had volunteered to help out at, say, tight end or linebacker. But Tebow has been dead set on being an NFL quarterback, so that's out. Similarly, no NBA team figured out a subordinate role in which Lin could contribute. Only when the Knicks, having lost their three biggest stars for one game, simply turned the entire offense over to Lin did a role for him in the NBA emerge: star.
You can't live your life trying to make John Elway happy.
Ex recto, but I'd put a big bet on implicit bias. Recruiters have a model in their head of what a talented basketball players looks like; to the extent that one doesn't fit that model exactly, they're less likely to take a risk. (See also: Drew Brees. See further: plenty of occupations that have a "look.") Lin's Asian-American, plays a non-standard style, and went to Harvard. Whatever flaws he has become reasons to reject him, even if they would be overlooked in a player that fits the mental model.
And still, he wasn't overlooked entirely. One shouldn't expect, I think, that the perfect recruiting system is one in which stars are automatically stars from their first days on the team; luck always plays a big part.
The lockout shortened season probably also played a role here. There was no training camp to let coaches figure out that he was ready for more minutes.
For what it's worth that scouting report holds up pretty well.
From the point of view of the players, basketball recruiting has to be better than baseball recruiting. Baseball players have over a three percent chance of becoming one of the Pirates.
16 to 23 last: We couldn't be having this conversation about someone who had been missed entirely, because we would have no way of knowing who he was or that he, specifically, had been 'missed'.
Of course, I'm relying pretty heavily on something that I don't have the basketball knowledge to check: the impression I'm getting from the coverage is that Lin really did get 'missed' in an unusual way. He's not just good enough to play in the NBA, from the coverage he's been getting, he's spectacularly good when compared against the NBA as a peer group. I don't remember ever seeing this kind of media freakout over a benchwarmer who was suddenly a star before: there are people who were underrated and then get recognized, but not the kind of sudden, radical change in evaluation we're seeing here.
But I could be flat wrong about that: possibly this story isn't all that remarkable by NBA standards, and I don't remember the other times it's happened. Or possibly the intensity of the hype is largely determined by the Asian/Harvard story: if a black player from Georgetown had been a benchwarmer and had then played a series of games like Lin's, it wouldn't have been terribly newsworthy. Both of those possibilities are something I don't really have the knowledge to check.
From the basketball blogosphere:
A very good breakdown of what's gone into Lin's surprising success.
Lin before Lin (a case of a guard who was starting for the first time in their career and performed unexpectedly well in a small number of games when playing for a team that isn't in a major media market (though, I have to say, I'm impressed that Lin is still going strong).
Of course, I'm relying pretty heavily on something that I don't have the basketball knowledge to check: the impression I'm getting from the coverage is that Lin really did get 'missed' in an unusual way.
People are trying very hard to figure out if this is true (the links above give some more detail) but the short answer is, "probably, but it is still too early to know for sure."
I don't remember ever seeing this kind of media freakout over a benchwarmer who was suddenly a star before: there are people who were underrated and then get recognized, but not the kind of sudden, radical change in evaluation we're seeing here.
Well, yeah: scoring more points in the first five games you start than any player in NBA history* will do that.
* (since the merger)
I don't remember ever seeing this kind of media freakout over a benchwarmer who was suddenly a star before: . . . Or possibly the intensity of the hype is largely determined by the Asian/Harvard story:
The fact that he plays for NY is also a big part of it -- and that it's such a perfect story for the Knicks who have been (a) terrible for years, (b) had some optimism going into this season and (c) started slowly meant that a lot of people were ready to jump on any sign of good news for the team.
I would have expected something about Chandler in that breakdown.
Speaking of the NYT I sometimes find the "fit to print" business very annoying. As in this story about the "chink in the armor" affair which refuses to quote the offending phrase thereby rendering the story basically incomprehensible if you don't already know what happened.
One last note: I'm not trying to take anything away from what Lin is doing -- he has literally done as well as anybody could possible ask in the chance that he's gotten. But one of the important topics in sports analytics is figuring out how quickly one can draw conclusions from a limited sample size.
To give some of comparison, Lin has played 403 minutes so far this season. If you look at all players who have played between 350 and 500 minutes this season here are the leaders in PER
24.2 -- Jeremy Lin
22.2 -- Andrea Bargnani --former #1 overall pick who's widely considered a bust. Previous career high PER 16.4. 7'0" finesse player with a good outside shot
20.6 -- Spencer Hawes -- former #10 overall pick, widely considered a bust. Previous career high PER 13.8. 7'0" finesse player with a good outside shot
20.4 -- Gustavo Ayon -- 26 year old Rookie on a bad team. Very smart hustle player with a good scoring touch.
19.9 -- Chris Anderson -- hyperkinetic shot-blocking specialist. Has always put up good numbers in short minutes
19.0 -- Sundiata Gaines -- backup guard for the Nets. Played 500 minutes in two seasons prior to this one.
18.1 -- Nikola Vucevic -- rookie reserve big man for the 76ers, considered a project player going into the season.
17.4 -- Corey Brewer -- Former #7 pick overall, widely considered a bust. Cut by the team that drafted him, and traded once by the team that signed him after that. Defensive minded wing player who's never been good offensively. Previous career high PER 12.1
Two things are obvious from that list (1) Lin is way better than almost everybody else on the list (2) Almost everybody else on that list is playing at a level that is probably unsustainable -- you would expect to see significant drop offs from almost all of them over time.
The first link in 27 is pretty good.
Yeah, an example of really good online sports-writing.
34: Yeah, that drove me nuts too -- I couldn't figure it out and had to google for it.
More specifically a pick-and-roll requires two people, and Chandler is very good at his part of it.
26: I'm not getting your point here; of course we can't compare Lin to someone we don't know about, but there are lots of cases of players who got a lucky break or who were undrafted but later became stars (one of the ESPN guys makes up a whole all-star team of them regularly.) Usually it's because they didn't fit the mold in some way: too short, too small, got drafted by a team that didn't use them well and then the coach and offense changed, etc.
My point was just that at this point we don't whether the freakout and Linsanity and all that is due to his being a completely overlooked superstar because he didn't fit the mold, or being a somewhat overlooked very good player who plays in a large media market who had the virtue of good timing and a game that took opponents a few games to figure out.
Either way I find it to be completely plausible that racial stereotyping factored into it; it's just in the latter case it's a harder problem to get people to take seriously.
I feel bad for the ESPNews guy who wouldn't have been news without the headline, and almost certainly wasn't trying to make a pun.
39: I agree with most of what you said -- I was making the limited point that it's not terribly meaningful to say that he wasn't overlooked entirely, because we don't have access to any situation where a similar player was overlooked entirely; the guy who was overlooked entirely is dominating a playground someplace and we don't know who he is or if he could have had a career. If we're looking at how excellent players get missed in the recruiting system, our only data points are going to be near-misses like Lin, because those are the only ones we can actually know had the potential to succeed in the NBA.
almost certainly wasn't trying to make a pun
I'm skeptical.
40: I doubt it. There's a good chance he didn't mean it with any malice or think of 'chink' as too offensive to use, but punning is a totally standard thing to do in headlines, and without the pun I don't think "Chink in the Armor" is a particularly compelling headline.
If you told me the game was against a team with a notoriously impenetrable defense and Lin showed an unusual ability to make shots through this otherwise armor-like shield, maybe. But it really looks like a racial pun.
Virtually every headline on ESPN contains a pun. This was no exception.
I assume everybody is trying to make puns, but that may be projection.
If the story had only been illustrated with a drawing of Lin, lance and shield in hand, on a charger, then we could have been sure.
The headline guy deserved to be fired, the other guys suspension is harsh.
the game was against a team with a notoriously impenetrable defense and Lin showed an unusual ability to make shots through this otherwise armor-like shield, maybe
You've got it backwards: the headline following the Knicks' lone loss of the Lin era. So, if you're being generous towards the writer, you're looking at a team that found a way to stop the seemingly-unstoppable Lin. Which fits the facts, basically. But I still strongly doubt the pun didn't even occur to the writer.
and it says a lot that he made it to the NBA bench for years (very few do)
For one year.
the headline following s/b "the headline followed"
48: Yeah, that doesn't really fit the facts: successfully blocking an attack isn't finding a chink in armor. That's not a situation that would lead to that headline absent a pun.
47: What's the deal with the other guy? I don't know the story.
Basically its fair to hold people writing headlines to a high standard, as they have time to think about exactly what they're saying, but when you're talking not writing you have to allow for the occasional inapt phrasing.
http://m.espn.go.com/wireless/story?storyId=7591778
If you told me the game was against a team with a notoriously impenetrable defense
Well, I haven't been playing close attention this year, but I have watching box scores and stats charts enough to know Dallas has been playing championship level defense this year. So last night impressed the hell outa me.
But there is a lot of psychology that happens in these situations, as in "showing Lin up" or "not getting humiliated" that can break a defense down. For one game. That's why playoffs run five and seven.
I thought playoffs ran that long because selling TV commercials pays the bills.
"Crafty"
It's almost like he's Jewish.
"The reason, I suspect, that basketball appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background," wrote Paul Gallico, sports editor of the New York Daily News and one of the premier sports writers of the 1930s, "is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness.And more recently and more in line with curren stereotypes.
52: Oh, yeah, 'chink' is an ordinary enough word in a non-racist sense that it seems like overkill to fire someone for saying it off-the-cuff unless the context made it sound like he meant it as a slur. I'd think a talking to, rather than firing, would make more sense there.
Is he articulate? Before Bush, I would have assumed so based on Ivy League and all that. Can't trust anything nowadays, though.
56: The father of one of Buck's best friends from high school is a 5'7" Jewish guy who put himself through med school in Italy playing Italian pro basketball. His brother, not much taller, was a benchwarmer for the Knicks.
Here's another very good article about Lin from HoopSpeak.com.
Shockingly there's some very good discussion in the comments about what role racial bias has played in Lin not having been highly regarded prior to the last couple of week.
And yet more Knicks Judaism (Amar'e Stoudemire ).
56: In baseball, the word used for undersized white players (who generally aren't very good) is "scrappy".
Fortunately they didn't actually fire the anchor, they just suspended him for a month. Which is still too harsh. A stern talking to and an apology would have been more appropriate, but the headline made them escalate.
Lin is not actually a pioneer.
Trivia question: Who was the first Asian-American Ivy Leaguer to star on a New York City professional team? Unlike Lin, he played for a championship team.
Lots of high schools bump the top possible grade to 5.0 from 4.0 for honors or AP classes. It's silly, but what do you do?
Get a rake and yell at kids who come near your lawn.
I don't even have a lawn. I have a couple of three-year-old tomato plants in a window box.
That's fine. The rake is the key. You can just yell at the kids to go away.
Or yell at the tomato plants to stay put.
I will confe that I was pretty gobsmacked by that should be objectively measurable failed because the talented person came from an unexpected demographic group. in the OP in this instance* (but probably just piling on to say so now).
I'll go further and say that if Lin is starring for an NBA team 2 years from now I will eat my hat (or come on the hot thread for 2/20/2014 and eat humble pie). I suspect that he'll be in the league showing flashes of brilliance. 18.2 & 27.2 sound pretty spot on. But we'll see!
*It probably was a factor at some level. And of course the whole history of basketball (and other sports) has been fraught with stereotypes and the talent "system" has manifestly missed out on people due to their ethnicity. To me it just does not accord with the facts in evidence in this case.
Even though they are more vulnerable, plants don't really respond to rake-related threats.
73: Oh, have yours been wandering off? You may need to use time-outs.
(or come on the hot thread for 2/20/2014...
That will be the one about Hillary Clinton knifing the ambassador from Belize.
75: Mine keep refusing to produce fruit.
72: As I said, I don't actually know what I'm talking about here. You sound as if you do, and as if you think the answer is "No one missed anything, Lin isn't that good (or wasn't that good when people were looking at him in the past)." I obviously don't have the knowledge to disagree with you, but I have the impression that there are people who would -- could you spell out in a little more detail why you think what you do?
As LB should know, MIT also does a 5.0 scale.
I saw some analysis that the exact same style of play (as measured by various advanced stats) is commonly described as scrappy (or gritty) in whites and athletic in blacks.
I've tried to grow tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil, pumpkin, raspberries, blueberries, and parsley. I've concluded that maybe a patio which gets 4 hours of sunshine, and is adjacent to a groundhog den, isn't the best place to grow stuff. The raspberry bushes are still alive, but all I ever get from it is more sticker-ridden branches.
80.1: Which I also thought was silly. Although I was grateful that it made my GPA look a tiny bit less horrendous the semester I decided to transfer.
I've tried to grow tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil, pumpkin, raspberries, blueberries, and parsley.
Let's establish what kind of plant this is, first.
I'm considering planting some cold hardy seeds this week so if they do grow I can talk about how I started a garden in MA in feb.
Or why you'd refrigerate the seeds.
86: to breed a master race, of course.
Unless they changed something Harvard grades are on a 15 point scale, with a gap between every letter grade. So A=15, A-=14, B+=12, etc. This is a particularly stupid thing to do when the average grade for a large class is halfway between an A- and a B+.
48: Yeah, that doesn't really fit the facts: successfully blocking an attack isn't finding a chink in armor.
Huh? Finding a way to stop/injure an opponent that previously seemed unstoppable/uninjurable is "finding a chink in the armor". That's a perfectly ordinary use of that metaphor. That's what the headline writer meant, for sure. He probably also meant it as a pun, but absent the pun it still makes total sense.
Attributing Lin's lack of playing time the last two years (or teams failing to draft him two years ago) to racism is difficult to justify.
Playing at Harvard instead of in the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac 10 is a legitimate reason to discount his college statistics. While he played very well in some big games against larger programs--UCONN particularly--that's too small of a sample. The competition in that league is substantially lower. Further, his stats weren't phenomenal. He averaged about 16 points, 4 assists and 4 rebounds. Jimmy Butler played for Marquette--much better conference--and averaged 16 points, 6 rebounds and 2 assists. He's currently averaging about 8 minutes a game for the Bulls. Is he not being given a fair opportunity to show his talent? And there's a player like this on every team in the NBA--very good college basketball players who rarely get off the bench. There are hundreds more currently playing in the NBDL or overseas. If you're on an NBA team, your talent has been recognized. I find it implausible that an NBA coach would keep a superior player on the bench on account of race.
So people did recognize his substantial talent before this amazing run of games. John Hollinger--ESPN's NBA stats guy--noted before this season that Lin's limited playing time last season suggested he had the skill to be a consistent NBA player. Further, the fact that NBA teams kept picking Lin off of waivers meant that they recognized the talent. There are a ton of guys playing in Europe or Asia that would have loved to take Lin's roster spot the last two years. NBA teams could have signed them instead of Lin, but they didn't.
But there's one thing that convinces me that the issue wasn't race: the Warriors and Rockets beat writers haven't been pushing out stories about how Lin was dominating in practice but being relegated to the bench. If Lin was tearing apart Monta Ellis, Stephen Curry and Kyle Lowry in practice, the beat writers would being making that known right now (it's practically a national pastime for sports writers to blame a teams lack of success on the GM/Coach). It's more likely that Lin was playing well enough to justify his continued presence in the NBA but wasn't outplaying these guys in practice.
I think it's quite possible that Lin's lack of recruitment coming out of high school could be attributed to race. But I don't think race had much to do with his lack of success over the last two years.
89: It flips the offense/defense of the armor metaphor. Not saying no one ever used the metaphor like that, but it makes much more sense talking about an offense unexpectedly penetrating a defense, than it does for a defense unexpectedly blocking an offense.
90.4 There was a lockout! They weren't having practice!
I don't think (in this context) it's about offense/defense at all. It's about winning/losing. By saying the other team found a "chink in the armour", he meant that the other team found a way to beat Lin/the Knicks.
I agree that strictly limiting it to situations where an offense unexpectedly penetrates a defense a defense would be a better use of the metaphor, but that's really asking too much of sportswriters.
Okay then, remove "Kyle Lowry" from the sentence.
"Okay, then remove '' from the sentence."
78: I am probably sounding a bit more definitive than I have a right to. But the analyses in 18.2 & 27.2 seem pretty sound (and the draft one in particular is pretty "routine"; there are a lot of pretty damn good basketball players who do not get to the NBA, or just have some bench time there). And as noted in 61.1 (which is also a good overview--possibly some sour grapes, but Lin did not in fact play that well against Cornell) he was never Ivy League Player of the Year and I doubt any ethnic stereotyping was involved in that (and the players who beat him are not NBA players). Now there are a lot of reasons why players can have different relative success in college versus pros which is why there are a lot of people doing the stuff like 18.2 rather than just going by stats and college awards. The reasons are mostly associated with speed and/or strength but those did not necessarily weigh in Lin's favor. So that plus the very good stuff in 27.2 lead me to think that the likely path will be some significant regression to the mean.
But we'll see! Go Knicks! With a Black Jew, a Chink , an African/Amercan-Puerto Rican (Anthony) and an aging African/Amercan-Trinidad Tobagan (Bibby) they'll do great. To bad Isiah Thomas isn't still around to piss off ogged see it all come together.
93: He was on the Warriors last year. And they still have practice this year, just not as much.
My favorite description of Lin has got to be, "He's a feisty little thing."
an aging African/Amercan-Trinidad Tobagan
That was Jamaica and a bobsled.
John candy was part Trinidad-Tobagan?
It is simply amazing that I cannot write even the shortest thing without a typo.
. . . . you think the answer is "No one missed anything, Lin isn't that good (or wasn't that good when people were looking at him in the past)." I obviously don't have the knowledge to disagree with you, but I have the impression that there are people who would -- could you spell out in a little more detail why you think what you do?
I'm more impressed than Stormcrow is with what Lin has done but I would add two additional reasons for hesitation. (1) Sportswriters love to get excited about people excelling in small sample sizes, it's one of the pleasures of sports*. (2) If one of your major sources of information is the NYT it's worth remembering that they aren't going to be objective in this case; Lin is the hometown hero at the moment.
I'll say again, at the moment Lin is rising to every opportunity that's presenting itself and that's good. It is, in fact, amazing, it's just also true that it hasn't been that many games and it's overwhelmingly likely that he won't play this well for the entire season (or his entire career).
I will recommend again the link in 35 which talks a little bit about the many ways in which people can get caught up in a story like this and also, "Jeremy Lin and the Joy of the Unexpected" by the same writer.
You know who got overlooked?Hit Sidd FinchSidd Finch
65: No takers? Ron Darling, whose mother was Chinese and who spoke some Chinese, left Yale after three years to join the Mets in the early '80's, where he had a decent pitching career. He did better in endorsements than most players of his ability because of the Asian/Ivy league thing, and because he was really good looking.
He was also good at marketing, conspicuously keeping texbooks in his locker at Shea Stadium so he could talk about how he was still finishing up his degree (which never happened). His dormmates noted that he had never been seen in the vicinity of a textbook back when he was a student.
105: But I meant to insert a typo to prove the rule and screed it up.
At least the headline didn't say the defense was niggardly.
Basically, I'm trusting NickS implicitly on this, but am more jaded of an asshole than him.
106: Because it's related and nobody has done it in a while.
67: it's silly, but what do you do?
Roll it back over to zero. 4.2 -> 0.2
That'll teach those poppies not to grow so tall.
I remain embittered that an A- at my alma mater is sufficient to pull one's GPA down from a 4.0, while an A+ has no countervailing properties.
80: Wait, why would MIT have a 5.0 scale? Every university class is an AP class.
I always took the additional honors points for granted; an A in an honors class is harder to achieve than an A in a B-level class, so why shouldn't it be measured more highly.
OTOH, I thought it was really mickey mouse that my HS gave quarter points for pluses (I no longer recall if they deducted for minuses). I just don't really buy that grading is that fine-grained an activity. Also, of course, I wanted to get straight As by scoring 90 in every class.
My school did the GPA as percentage points.
108: Huh. I was a huge Mets fan in the Ron Darling era, but I never knew his mom was (is) Chinese. I did always think he looked somehow distinctive, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
My mom certainly had a crush on him. And, as an announcer, he's reasonably articulate - the books may have been props, but he's not a dumb jock.
I couldn't put my finger on it
Because it was stuck in a Chinese finger trap? That's racist.
116: Because we're better than you are. Seriously, I don't think there was any justification except "Look, we all know that someone who pulled a B at MIT would have pulled an A anywhere else. Deal."
120: Wow. That's incredibly... lame? Pathetic, even?
Do the departments that are manifestly not superior give out 5s for As?
What about the departments that are kind of crummy, but they need to be included for the purposes of being well-rounded? Anyone getting an A in writing at MIT would have gotten a B at Iowa, so therefore....
Also pluses and minuses at MIT are internal only and grades from freshman year are not released(although I think they maybe changed that recently.)
And our HS did it on percent, with +5 on the final course grade for AP or honors.
Some high schools (including mine) add .2 for each AP class taken rather than setting a different overall scale. So you could get above a 4.0, but not necessarily as high as 5.0, depending on how many AP classes you took.
You'd have to take four AP math classes to get to 5.0.
121: Nope, my A in Comedy from Aristophanes Through John Ford is still a 5.0 on my GPA. Because MIT is just that much better than any school you may have happened to go to.
Also I'm both delighted that the basketball thread has become the GPA thread and puzzled at how outraged some people seem to be about the different ways schools calculate GPA.
I'm not outraged! I'm flummoxed.
I was always embarrassed that CMU had an inferiority complex wrt MIT (I suspect that's faded now, as I think CMU's status has risen), but that was just among the student body. For an administration to do something so crassly self-regarding is, again, lame.
Also, of course, it's kind of pointless to have GPAs if they're scaled differently. Actually, I'm not sure there's any real point to GPAs anyway, but the point remains that arbitrarily assigning different values to grades renders the concept meaningless.
Some more Very Interesting Racism
The author, John Marsden takes great care in his novels to not name invaders ethnicity. That's fine for a book but you can't show a generic soldier. Probably in consideration Australia's geopolitical arena, producers choose Asia as the origin of the invading force. It doesn't take much imagination to know the bad guys are from China.
Like they couldn't use the country that has actually been an Imperialist invading neo-colonizer? Showing you know, American soldiers with SS armbands pissing on Australian teenagers in torture-camps?
Guess not. Guess why not.
(Real tin-foil types think austerity economics in developed nations and rationalization of the ME political economies are mere preparation for the Global Resource War between West and East to come. I disavow and repudiate such craziness categorically. Of course. Glad I'm old.)
128: Maybe they're not scaled differently. I think the argument for the MIT scale is that a 4.0 on the MIT scale is the same as a 4.0 anyplace else. It's just that no place else even measures the level of achievement represented by an MIT A.
(Any self-inflatedness here should be understood as coming from an MIT dropout.)
Robert Farley over at LGM really gave me an epiphany on this stuff with a post on China-USA military disputes.
Shorter:"We are the fucking Good Guys and if the Chinese won't kiss our ass we have every right to be very suspicious of Chinese intentions."
I thought:"War's Coming."
Also, of course, it's kind of pointless to have GPAs if they're scaled differently. Actually, I'm not sure there's any real point to GPAs anyway, but the point remains that arbitrarily assigning different values to grades renders the concept meaningless.
I agree, but I guess I've just always thought of GPAs as essentially meaningless. Even if the scale is the same across schools, it's long been notoriously true that standards for assigning grades differ a lot, which makes comparisons impossible anyway.
Re 132
Particularly amusing for Brits educated at institutions where if you are really good you might average somewhere around 65%. I had my grades translated (in formal transcript form) to GPAs once for an application for US study. I bet they looked hilarious.
A GPA of 65.0 would look pretty impressive.
Many grad school applications will require the applicant to recalculate the GPA to a standard to avoid these problems.
130: It's just that no place else even measures the level of achievement represented by an MIT A.
17: Hey! She's not at a podunk school now!
::cough::
114
I remain embittered that an A- at my alma mater is sufficient to pull one's GPA down from a 4.0, while an A+ has no countervailing properties.
This wasn't true at Caltech. IIRC an A+ was 4.3 and an A- was 3.7 so they would average to 4.0. It was also possible to have a GPA above 4 if you got a lot of A+s.
The inconsistency of GPAs will all be solved once we have well-defined student learning outcomes, assessment rubrics, and we have closed the feedback loop.
At my undergrad institution of last attendance an A+ was meaningless. It was basically just the professor putting a gold star next to your name, but didn't count for your GPA. Which, I gotta tell you, it would have really helped me out if it did count towards your GPA.
The gold stars would have been tangible, but those cost money.
Meanwhile, at my current graduate institution, there are essentially three levels of passing for graduate students, but they map them to letter grades, so a B is failing (and it's really hard to fail). It's like Weimar grade inflation.
143: that's standard unless it's a weed-out situation, though.
What is (college) GPA really used for? Just for getting into grad school, pretty much, right? But people shouldn't be going to grad school for the most part! So this registers as so much fluffing.
Uh, GPA isn't used for getting jobs, is it?
Law jobs, yes. But that's law school gap.
Or gpa. I've just had some very serious cough syrup. We'll see how long I can continue to spell.
Forgive me -- what is law school gap? Are the grades given in law school jumped over or something in assessing applicants for law jobs, so that college GPA is relevant?
The law school GAP is where you buy all your outfits for law school. Duh.
North of the Mason Dixon line they'd call it a pass.
Maybe Charley means law jobs for which the applicant didn't attend law school, so there's a gap, so college GPA is consulted. Aha!
Oh, I hadn't seen 147. Here I was heating black bean soup for dinner and mulling over this "law school gap" which apparently everyone knows about.
JFK wanted to create smart bombs so he campaigned about the importance of the missile gpa.
I will say that I've also been reading the title of this post as "I wish I knew more about skeeball ..."
Yeah, I know how you feel.
I can only read the first word. I learned all my Latin in church.
133.--When I took courses at French universities, the exchange-program staff did this translation-into-grades for the American system. A 12 out of 20 was translated as an A. 10 out of 20 was a B+, if I recall correctly.
129 doesn't mean Bob actually read Tomorrow When the War Began, right? Just some weird article about the movie version? I don't want to have have to start sharing my (post)apocalyptic young adult books like that.
Another article on Lin. I haven't been watching the NBA - not easy to follow it up here - but going by stats, it really doesn't seem like Lin is actually playing better than Curry or Ellis can play when they play well.
Also, lots of people discounted Steve Nash because of the competition he faced at Santa Clara. He was not heavily recruited out of high school and though he was drafted (unlike Lin) it was not clear how well he'd actually do. He also started his career as a backup to Kidd, IIRC, so it took a while for him to get going on his own.
160: Yes, I thought of Steve Nash as a possible Jeremy Lin career trajectory if he is being more successful than I am thinking he will be. Nash was drafted fairly high (15th)*, but really did not become a factor until he moved to Dallas after two years. And out of high school, ... you know, Ca-na-da.
*Although as the NBA has only 2 rounds in its draft so there are just 60 drafted players in total.
158:Don't worry, I don't read fiction. I wouldn't want to share my Marxist historiography either.
Did you know...
...Caribbean sugar to England financed the enclosures and wool sales to Portugal in exchange for bullion which was used to purchase Baltic grain? This had the effect of hardening feudal structures in Poland and the Ukraine and Russia creating the classic serfdom in the 17th century on. It had been lighter before, but E Europe couldn't increase production except by taking land and labor from the peasants.
Banaji, 1977.
(Oshii's Avalon was very good)
I though of Nash, but in terms of D'Antoni and his offensive system. Run & gun, pick & roll, creates great numbers, but limits championship chances.
Nowitzki made #20 all-time scoring tonight, passing Parrish.
New York got beat.
While I was spending time studying stats today, I decided I am not worried about OKC. They haven't learned a thing.
145: yes, employers will often look at GPA. Some request and look at transcripts; the big consulting firms may have a GPA cut-off for interviews (I'm hearing 3.5); and it's a pretty standard thing to note on a resume, when applying for internships or first job out of college.
It's true that in college Nash was already a spectacularly passer and generally pretty obviously skilled with handling the ball. So while some took the view that the lower level of competition made him seem better than he was, others pointed out that some of his teammates couldn't come anywhere close to matching his skill and so were often unprepared to find the ball suddenly arrive in their hands out of nowhere. By that logic, he'd actually turn out to be an even better player when he had teammates at his level. You can see who was right.
165: By that logic, he'd actually turn out to be an even better player when he had teammates at his level
And I think it is safe to say that his draft position reflected this view.
As linked several times in the past, the essential site for college GPA discussions.
GPA = 2.8 + Rejection Percentage /200 + (if the school is private add 0.2).
135: Are the mean and variance generally available?
168 was me.
Grade inflation has doubtless influenced my response to other "letter grade" rankings. So while a B+ from Entertainment Weekly means a movie is well-crafted, entertaining, not earth-shattering but still worthwhile, my gut reaction is always "B+? Wow, must be pretty lousy..."
At this web archive link is an old (late '90s) chart which UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law apparently used to adjust grades from different schools. Swarthmore had the highest "rank".
158
129 doesn't mean Bob actually read Tomorrow When the War Began, right? Just some weird article about the movie version? I don't want to have have to start sharing my (post)apocalyptic young adult books like that. ...Thorn
People never cease to amaze me.
Why did you think the crowd would find that amusing, Thorn? Please explain the joke to me.
Have I done you some personal harm that I have forgotten or overlooked? I don;'t remember directing anything at you. Tell me so I might apologize.
148:I don't want to have have to start sharing my (post)apocalyptic young adult books like that. ...Thorn
Does this mean that if you learned that I had ever read the novels of James Marsden they would suddenly and irrevocably become less valuable and less appreciated, profaned and cheapened by my touch? That would be sad.
Trust me, it doesn't require my shining light for deep ugliness to show itself.
Did you know...
...Caribbean sugar to England financed the enclosures
Unlikely. Why would the enclosures need financing at all? They were about taking land rights off people. Enclosure was, presumably, profitable in itself.
This is as wrong as those hysterics who talk about "illegal copying of DVDs finances the drug trade". Er, no. The drug trade finances the drug trade.
True that the demands for Baltic grain led to the enserving of Polish farmers though, if not so much from English as Dutch demands.
Did you know that the cities of Holland (Amsterdam, Haarlem etc.) were financing private wars against Denmark while supposedly a part of the despotic Habsburg Empire of Charles V? All to protect the herring fleets and force free trade in the Baltic.
174.2 Didn't know that, but not entirely surprised. I was told that the constitution of the Empire was such that a third of it could be at war with another third of it before anybody was obliged to inform the Emperor.
173:As the farmers were driven off the English and int the cities so that the estates could be used for grazing, who fed them in the cities and the Industrial Revolution, with what food, grown where, paid for how?
Yes, there were costs to enclosure that needed to be financed.
bob, it was a joke and I'm sorry that I hurt your feelings. I didn't mean that I don't want to have to share pop culture touchstones with you, only that I was surprised that you came up with a link to that because it seems far afield from what you're usually reading or watching. I should have just written that I was surprised by that, which is how I was feeling. I don't mind "sharing" any books with you, though I think some of his more psychological novels are better than the invasion stories. Have you read any?
As the farmers were driven off the English and int the cities so that the estates could be used for grazing, who fed them in the cities and the Industrial Revolution, with what food, grown where, paid for how?
In general not so much. You're describing the Scottish, and to some extent the Irish experience, where the depopulation of areas seized for grazing was facilitated by forced emigration to Canada and indeed to English cities.
The "enclosure movement" was primarily aimed at extending arable by enclosing the commons which had been used for grazing - actually the opposite of what you suggest. In most cases enclosures were carried out on the nod, with the areas enclosed divided up by agreement among landowners and their larger and middling tenants, and the people who lost out badly were the very poor who had been dependent on grazing the commons and on free resources to be found there. Most of these people remained in their villages as wage labourers rather than as poor peasants; their standard of living was significantly reduced, but they weren't driven out.
The influx of population into the industrial cities came partly from people who found that the wages there were actually better than they could find at home, but largely from people who had historically been involved in rural industries- e.g. spinners and weavers whose "put out" piece work dried up and had to to to Manchester to weave by steam. This was a shocking episode, but not really connected with the enclosures.
Surprisingly little of the new industrial plant was directly financed by sugar. Canals were, mills not so much.
bob, it was a joke and I'm sorry that I hurt your feelings.
Don't encourage him. Next he'll be wanting to eat with utensils and sit at the adult table.
You're describing the Scottish, and to some extent the Irish experience, where the depopulation of areas seized for grazing was facilitated by forced emigration to Canada and indeed to English cities.
Indeed. And elsewhere too- New Zealand, for many of them, and the rest of the Empire through the armed forces (which were 42% Irish and 14% Scottish by 1830).
178:I think this is the quote from Banaji Theory as History that I was thinking about.
On the eve of the seventeenth century, according to the price-series constructed by Braudel and Spooner, the price of grain in England, France or Holland was 200-300% higher than the price of Polish grain. The growing volume of grain-exports from the port of Danzig had become a crucial mechanism in stabilising grain-prices in those countries in the period of rapid demographic reconstruction and currency-depreciation which began around 1570.
I guess he doesn't say that England was importing grain, but that is what I got from it. I may have been wrong to connect it to enclosure. My point really is that sugar may not have financed the building of the mills, but free labor (that had partly fed itself before) must also be fed, as cheaply as possible.
Oh, England was importing grain all right, because the population was exploding, both due to extended life expectation and to immigration (from Scotland and Ireland as well as the continent). The same thing made the enclosures profitable. Riots over the price of bread were a fairly constant feature.
(And of course I am trying to relate this stuff to the political economics of shogunate Japan, and the implications for the current re-feudalization in the West)
The U.K. was mercantilist and had a government which granted disproportionate power to rural landholders. I'm not saying that they didn't import corn, but it wasn't seen as a good thing when they did. It wasn't until 1850 or so before they went for cheap food.
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Random tweet from somebody I've never heard of:
I'm researching Turkish swearing. My favourite has the literal translation, "may a violin bow enter your ass".
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184 is of course true. (The "Treasury view" is still near enough mercantilist as far as I can see.)
I may have been wrong to connect it to enclosure.
It's the "around 1570" bit that's doing the work; 1770 would be better.
Back to the OP: Larry Wilmore did a bit about Lin that ended with "Knickerbocker, please."
I think the argument for the MIT scale is that a 4.0 on the MIT scale is the same as a 4.0 anyplace else. It's just that no place else even measures the level of achievement represented by an MIT A.
Setting aside the preening here (MIT's, not LB's), I'd actually want to see some evidence for this - is an MIT A precisely as far above a Caltech A as a Caltech A is above a Caltech B? It's simply not a serious practice; it's just embarrassing.
Anyways, the real flaw in the concept is that it only makes sense in a world in which potential employers/grad admissions offices don't get to see what school you went to. To inflate the grade points on top of the MIT repetitional boost is bogus, unless MIT wants to claim that their reputation is unfairly low (a claim even harder to justify than the one in my previous para).
BTW, I'm not clear on one point: is the inflation all down the line? Is an MIT F worth 1.0? Because that would be beyond awesome.
Teo, of course, gets it right in 132.
To the OP: HoopSpeak has another great article on the broad topic of Jeremy Lin.
Lin will be a perennial NBA all-star for years to come, and remembered as one of the best point guards of his generation. Don't understand why that isn't obvious to anyone who has been watching him. Do people not watch enough NBA games to understand how unusual this kind of sustained performance is? Basketball is not baseball where a guy can go on a hitting run for a bit until pitchers figure him out. You don't do what he's doing unless you are legit. He is also the only case in NBA history of a totally unknown benchwarmer who has emerged instantly as a legitimate star. He could not be more unusual and deserves all his hype. If anything I thought he was still being underrated until perhaps the Dallas game.
I saw him in the UConn game a couple of years ago and immediately thought he had serious NBA potential. UConn clearly could not stay in front of him or prevent him from penetrating. I was very surprised when he didn't get drafted -- I think racism had a lot to do with that. When I saw the video of him against Wall in summer league I thought again he'd get a shot, surprised it's taken this long.
His game requires him to take a strong leadership role and dominate the ball to a certain extent, perhaps that plays into why he needed a while to get his legs under him. Usually those slots are reserved for high draft picks. He lucked into a great situation with the Knicks, if not his talent might have been overlooked.
Actually, the 'best point guards of his generation' does have to be qualified by the New Normal for point guards, which is being a star if you're good. Point guard is a star position now like 2-guard used to be, since the rules changes have so greatly advantaged them. So it's harder for a point guard to stand out historically. I mean, Lin will clearly be better than John Wall, last year's number one pick. But he's in a pack of PG stars/future stars his age or younger -- Derrick Rose, Russell Westbrook, Kyrie Irving, Ricky Rubio, etc. I think he can definitely hold his own in that bunch but doubtful he'll be the best. And Chris Paul is better than all of them and only a little older.
Lin has his NY Knicks visibility and his ethnicity to help him stand out though, that's probably good for a couple of extra all-star slots.
Nope, an MIT F is a 0 (which means it brings down your average GPA more than it would on a 4-point scale). I think the odd scale is a historical artifact, and any preening is independent.
I kind of wonder what role GPAs play in grad school admissions. I suppose I'll find out at some point. I've heard various professors opine at one point or another "you can't rely on the people with stellar GPAs; they don't know how to think for themselves, they just work too hard on figuring out what others want from them." I assume they never actually use that logic to reject people with awesome GPAs, though.
My grad school GPA sucked relative to my earlier-in-life GPAs, but it sure didn't have anything to do with more independent thinking going on in the lab class that I sucked at.
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Occam's Razor leads me to bet on the faulty wiring hypothesis best explaining the speeding neutrino results. Plus it's on the internet.
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197: there's a chance that logic was used to convince people it wasn't a terrible, terrible mistake to admit me.
IME, most people use GPA as an initial screen, often with an automatic cutoff below a certain number, but after that it's pretty qualitative. Of the numerical inputs for graduate admissions, GPA has been shown to be a better predictor of success than GRE, but neither is great. The rationale is that GRE is vaguely correlated with intelligence, and GPA with effort, and you're more likely to be successful if you are hard-working and average intelligence than smart and lazy.
Trusted recommendations are far more important than either of the numerical scores.
To the thing linked in 170: I think I've benefitted a bit (in admissions to other schools, not in getting jobs) from my undergrad GPA, but what people don't get is that at BYU many of us weren't getting drunk or getting laid. Yes, the classes were hard, and I guess I earned those grades, but you can't realistically compare that to people who were getting similar grades but also getting drunk and getting laid. That's a lot of balls in the air, man.
202 Reminds me of the following from Russo's The Risk Pool (his best book) as the narrator opens mouth and inserts foot:
"Did I tell you why I left Swarthmore?" she said.
"No" I admitted.
"I was on academic probation," she said. "Valedictorian of St. Mary's '67. Academic probation, '68. Know how much I studied?"
"Don't feel bad," I said. "I never studied much the first couple years."
"I studied every night. Every minute."
Yeah, so Swarthmore (and that comes up later in the dialogue), but somewhat the same principle.
Similar for someone who produced as much work as a regular member of the Unfoggedtariat.
Yes, I would have been a complete failure at Swarthmore no doubt.
But are you saying we get a Mineshaft multiplier? Like, not only did I get a [weird grade invented to confuse potential employers] in Constitutional Law, but I got it while following most of the threads, including bob's and parsi's comments!
Oh man. I got an, um, A7 in stats, apparently. Even without following bob's comments!
Unfogged really pays off!
[weird grade invented to confuse potential employers]
Say what?
204.1: Fuck no you wouldn't have--unless you wanted to be.
294.2: Sure, it's like you're Harrison Bergeron. Or maybe ike wearing a cilice.
Hmm, Ike wearing a cilice. Assignment for apo.
204: Yes, I would have been a complete failure at Swarthmore no doubt.
Actually, if you read it in the context of the story, Russo should have chosen just about anyplace but Swarthmore for the point he was trying to make (although set in the late '60s so S'more not so much with the over-the-top "Anywhere else would have been an 'A'." culture at that time).
but you can't realistically compare that to people who were getting similar grades but also getting drunk and getting laid. That's a lot of balls in the air, man.
I can't believe everyone managed to resist picking up this low-hanging fruit. Such fortitude!
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Which of you lot set up this site?
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212: I, for one, am happy to accept the version of Pascal's wager that imposes zero cost on me. (It's not like other religions punish you for being posthumously Mormonized.) And I am truly moved by the humanity of a religion that seeks to save even those who have not the slightest ability to acknowledge the saving in this world, and did not worship their God while they were alive.
Too bad their god isn't real either, it seems nicer than some of the others. (At least recently.)
It's not like other religions punish you for being posthumously Mormonized
The Jews sure seem to get pissed about it.
Boy was Pascal a shitty Bayesian.
The Lin puns have gone far enough.
Those are fantastic. I love "Lintertainment."
216: Heh. Jon Stewart's recent joke about LYNchburg (the hometown of the Virginia legislator who proposed the recent crazy mandatory-transvaginal-ultrasound-prior-to-abortion bill) was my favorite so far. But, you know, local bias and all that.
214: Yes, but they don't actually think one goes to a worse place afterwards because the Mormons posthumously converted one.
Not that I don't understand why it's upsetting to see one's relatives who died in the Holocaust for being Jewish "converted" to LDS.
I feel kinda dumb about 192-93 after seeing Lin and the Knicks get totally undressed by the Heat tonight. On the other hand, the Heat are reeeaaaallly good. Heat over Thunder in 6 for the NBA championship this year. They destroy Derrick Rose and the Bulls along the way.
I feel kinda dumb about 192-93 after seeing Lin and the Knicks get totally undressed by the Heat tonight. On the other hand, the Heat are reeeaaaallly good. Heat over Thunder in 6 for the NBA championship this year. They destroy Derrick Rose and the Bulls along the way.
I feel kinda dumb about 192-93 after seeing Lin and the Knicks get totally undressed by the Heat tonight.
And not after contemplating the phrase "small sample size"?
I feel a little dumb about 192-93 after watching the Heat undress Lin and the Knicks tonight. On the other hand, the Heat are reaaalllly good and I bet they'll make the rest of the NBA look bad too come playoff time too. Heat over Thunder in 6 for the championship.
It's two points per standard comment, PGD. Three points for a pwn. One point extra for every foul comment, because it's a family blog.
Continuing to shoot baskets well after the whistle has blown just looks silly.
Wow, I must feel really really dumb. Screwed up computer.
And not after contemplating the phrase "small sample size"?
It's not a small sample size was my point. I'm pretty sure no NBA player has ever performed the way Lin did in his first 11 games and not become a significant star. Basketball is quite different than baseball that way. I still feel like 192-93 are true and Lin is going to be a star player in the league for years to come. But we'll see how he comes back from this -- the Heat game have him a good kick in the teeth to show him how he has to work on his game. But remember what they did to even Derrick Rose in the playoffs last year.
226: I'm going to keep shooting at my own basket until I get a triple double, goddamnit.
It's not a small sample size was my point. I'm pretty sure no NBA player has ever performed the way Lin did in his first 11 games and not become a significant star.
That's true only if you're being very picky about what it means to "perform the way Lin did."
There's Flip Murray , mentioned in 27.2: On Nov. 24 [after 12 games], Murray was averaging 23.9 points, 4.4 assists and 4.3 rebounds per game while shooting an even 50 percent from the field and nearly 40 percent from downtown.
But a better example might be Brandon Jennings. He averaged 27.3 ppg for his first 11 games but, as it turns out, that was inflated by the fact that he scored his career high 55 points in the 7th game of his career. At this point Brandon Jennings looks like he has the potential to be a very nice player but, three years into his career, he's still just an average PG.
Brandon Jennings -- first 11 games:
25.3 PPG, 47.8% FG, 5.5 assists per game
Flip Murray, first 11 games
23.9 PPG, 50% FG, 4.95 assists per game
Jeremy Lin -- first 11 games
24.5 PPG, 50% FG, 8.7 assists per game
Lin still looks pretty clearly the best of the three although they are broadly comparable and I haven't included turnovers.
I'll admit Murray is a crazy example and the best 'fluke' example in NBA history I know of. I think Murray was genuinely a pretty good offensive player but didn't have much else going for him and couldn't update his game over time. As for Jennings, his was also a historic debut and he was expected to be a star. He has turned out to be a volume shooter who scores a lot but not efficiently, but the book isn't over on him yet...he's going to have a long career I think.
I think Jennings is inherently limited by his size in a way Lin is not. We'll see if Lin is limited in other ways.
In general I don't think these two examples contradict the idea that Lin's sort of debut is very rare and highly indicative that the player will become a star.
I think Brandon Jennings will be a good player as well, I just don't think he looks like an obviously star at this point (also worth mentioning, Jennings is a year younger than Lin and at the time he was putting up those stats was three years younger than Lin is now).
The big advantage Lin has over the other two is that he gets more assists and, I have to say, I'm discounting that a bit because (a) assists are heavily influenced by system and (b) Lin has never before in his career (college or previous pro experience) looked like a top assist man.
Don't get me wrong, I think you're correct when you say Lin's sort of debut is very rare but I think it's important to recognize that there are some huge caveats when you compare Lin's starts to other people's first 11 starts because he's unusual in having an absolutely perfect situation (See 27.1). I really think it would be better to ask, "who else has had a streak of 11 games like this sometime in their 1st or second year?" You'd get a lot more people -- most of whom would still be very good players, but you'd also see some streaks like Kerry Kittles who ended his rookie season with a 9 game streak in which he averaged over 24 ppg and never scored less than 18 (and averaged 40 mpg which was part of it).
As long as this is the basketball thread this is kind of funny (though cruel).
232 seems absolutely 100% correct.
Lin is a great story but it's way too early to conflate great story w/great player.
I will not be satisfied with this discussion until someone scrapes basketballreference.com for all rookie year 11 game streaks comparable to Lin and determines the probability that one becomes a perennial all-star given such a streak.
In the meantime, I have $50 that Lin is an all-star next year.
Aren't All Stars chosen by fan balloting? You and your Oriental hordes are wily, PGD, but you'll not catch us napping again.
You and your Oriental hordes are wily
And inscrutable!
232: Kittles also shot 44% from the field during this streak, the same as his career shooting percentage over 500+ NBA games. The Nets won only 3 of the 9 games.
232: Kittles also shot 44% from the field during this streak,
But he was shooting a lot more 3's than Lin (29-60 for Kittles, vs 13-36 for Lin) which would raise his eFG%.
Yes, of course, Lin's streak is better than Kittles', that wasn't my point. My point was that if you only compare Lin's streak to the first 11 starts of other player's careers that you're creating an artificially small pool of comparison -- since the vast, vast, majority of players are not asked to be the primary offense for the team in their first 11 starts.
Also, everybody should look at the picture in 233. It just keeps making me smile when I think about it.
Listen, Nick, VW, and all you other weak-ass commenters. Here is my argument and here is your argument . Any questions? I didn't think so.
Semi-on topic Onion article, "Great Team Chemistry No Match For Great Team Biology".
...might also be susceptible to a squad with great team physics, such as being taller and able to shoot from a greater height.
