For years after the three-week stretch that made him an international phenomenon, Jeremy Lin went out of his way to avoid saying “Linsanity.”
The word, which he trademarked in 2012 to prevent strangers from profiting off his image, carried too much trauma. It had been coined by Knicks fans to describe their excitement for an unheralded reserve who blossomed — seemingly overnight — into a franchise hero, but it took on a less complimentary meaning when Lin failed to recapture the greatness he exhibited during those 18 days in February.
As Lin ping-ponged among six franchises in seven years before heading to China in August 2019 when no NBA team signed him in free agency, he came to view Linsanity as a painful reminder of his unfulfilled promise. His legacy was seemingly distilled to less than a month’s worth of games when he couldn’t do enough to be remembered for more.
But over the past year, therapy sessions and a memorable season in his maternal grandmother’s home country helped Lin come to terms with his place in basketball history. His recent decision to forgo a seven-figure contract in China and sign with Golden State’s G League affiliate, the Santa Cruz Warriors, for less than the average elementary school teacher’s salary was rooted in little more than a desire to prove to himself that he still belongs in the NBA.
Next Tuesday, Lin will report to Santa Cruz for physicals and onboarding ahead of the team’s Jan. 26 arrival at Orlando’s Disney campus for the G League bubble. A 15-game season, which begins Feb. 8, offers Lin a chance to ease NBA front offices’ concerns about his health and efficiency.
As one of the faces of the Chinese Basketball Association, Lin lived in a penthouse apartment in downtown Beijing, rode to practices in the backseat of a luxury sedan and often navigated throngs of autograph-seekers to reach the hotel elevator. Now, nine years removed from his last G League game, he is back in a level he remembers best for the time he and his Erie BayHawks teammates ate saltine crackers all day before a game in Portland, Maine, because the team bus had broken down during a snowstorm.
“In China, I had so much fan support and so many amazing things going on,” said Lin, who paced the Beijing Ducks last season in scoring (22.3 points per game), assists (5.6 per game) and steals (1.8 per game). “To surrender all of that and to come here, honestly, some people think I’m crazy.”
After his Ducks were beaten in the CBA’s semifinals in early August, Lin returned to his parents’ house in Palo Alto. Each morning, around 4 or 5, he awoke as questions about his future raced through his mind: Would he be comfortable finishing his career in front of adoring fans in China? Would he always have a gnawing regret that he hadn’t given the NBA another shot?
Lin had heard from his agent that NBA teams weren’t impressed by gaudy stats against inferior competition in the CBA. His quickest route back to the sport’s top level would be through the G League, from where 35 players were called up to the NBA last season.
At age 32, Lin recognizes that he can’t afford to waste time. His hope is that, after a dozen or so games with Santa Cruz at the Orlando bubble, he’ll land an NBA contract and show that he should never have had to leave the league in the first place.
In Lin’s mind, he is better than he was when he averaged 25 points and 9.2 assists in a nine-game span for the Knicks in February 2012, landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated for consecutive weeks and briefly boasted the league’s top-selling jersey. The string of injuries that hastened his NBA exit — most notably a ruptured patella tendon in the 2017-18 opener with Brooklyn — are no longer an issue.
For the first time in half a decade, Lin believes he has regained the killer instinct that was a driving force behind his star-dusted rise to international prominence. The self-doubt that plagued him during inconsistent stints two seasons ago with the Hawks and Raptors has given way to a desire to face the world’s best competition.
This transformation started when, after turning down offers to play in Russia, Israel and the EuroLeague, Lin signed a $3 million contract with one of China’s most storied franchises. Though fresh off becoming the first Asian American to lift the Larry O’Brien Trophy, he had felt uneasy about the discrepancy between the media attention he received in the wake of Toronto’s title and the tiny on-court role he played in making it happen.
It came as somewhat of a relief, then, when few in China cared that poor shooting had relegated Lin to less than a minute of playing time in the 2019 NBA Finals. When he arrived in Beijing that November, fans swarmed him at the airport. Some supporters, having read about his love for stuffed animals, tossed teddy bears at him. Others gave Lin even more personal gifts, such as a bottle of moisturizing lotion for his apparently dry hands or a scrapbook of his toddler nephew.
By mid-January, he had received more All-Star fan votes than any CBA player other than Guangdong Southern Tigers center and Chinese national team captain Yi Jianlian. A couple of months later, when Lin landed in Beijing to resume the Ducks’ season after a coronavirus shutdown, he had his hoodie raised high, ballcap tugged low and face hidden behind a mask when an airport employee asked Lin to sign his white hazmat suit.
“They treated me like a rock star out there,” Lin said. “It was a pretty surreal experience.”
Weeks before that autograph, when quarantining at the family home in Palo Alto prompted self-reflection, Lin decided he needed help processing the lingering trauma from Linsanity. Mano Watsa — a life coach and owner of a company with which Lin’s foundation has partnered — flew from Toronto to provide intensive therapy sessions.
For hours at a time, Lin talked with Watsa about the pressures of superstardom, the disappointment of not giving Linsanity a worthy encore and the fear that he’d forever be defined by less than a month of his life. Even after Watsa returned to Canada, Lin continued to chat with him over FaceTime at least once every two weeks in hopes of again feeling comfortable in his own skin.
Along the way, Lin began to embrace Linsanity as a special period in his journey that made Asians, Asian Americans and other overlooked minorities across the world believe that they, too, can aspire for greatness. During his less than 30-minute interview for this story, Lin went out of his way to mention“Linsanity four times.
That is important personal growth, but he isn’t content stopping there. Instead of returning to China, where he could revel in being one of the biggest celebrities in a basketball-crazed country of nearly 1.4 billion people, Lin figures he owes it to himself and his fans to see whether he can author another inspirational story.
At the start of NBA free agency in late November, he called childhood friend and Warriors assistant general manager Kirk Lacob to request an in-person meeting. A phone call wouldn’t have allowed Lacob, the son of Golden State majority owner Joe Lacob, to see the conviction in Lin’s face when Lin told him how ready he was for an NBA comeback.
Over lunch in San Francisco, Lin asked Lacob for a training-camp invite with the Warriors — the same team that gave him his first professional opportunity as an undrafted free agent out of Harvard in 2010. Lacob later informed him that, though the franchise didn’t have a training-camp spot available, it was willing to let him play with Santa Cruz at the G League bubble.
Golden State initially planned to sign Lin so that it could waive him and assign him to its G League affiliate. But less than three weeks after that fell through because the Warriors were unable to receive his letter of clearance from FIBA — basketball’s world governing body — in time, Santa Cruz finally inked him last Saturday.
“I truly believe that I’m an NBA player, but I’m not in it for the money, the clout, the fame or any of that,” Lin said. “I want to be able to make a difference. I want to bring glory to God through basketball.”
Connor Letourneau covers the Warriors for The San Francisco