Fathead Blog

How good is Jeremy Lin? It’s safe to say that we don’t know yet and here’s the thing – we probably won’t for a while.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Lin, in his second NBA season, is taking the league by storm. As a little-used guard with the Golden State Warriors, he signed with the Knicks this season and has been the dominant story in the sports landscape of New York over the past month. He’s not only been good offensively, but really good. And the kicker is that the slumping Knicks are finally showing some signs of life in the Eastern Conference. Add it all together and you’ve got a storyline eerily similar to Tim Tebow’s this past season in the NFL (Note: Linking Tim Tebow and Jeremy Lin in the same story may cause irreparable damage to internet search engines everywhere).

No one can argue with the fact that Lin has been a dominant offensive presence. He went for 20 points or more in seven of his past eight games heading into the weekend and had a coming out party of sorts in a win against the Lakers, dropping 38. Here’s the thing, though: the jury is still out on him.

Jeremy Lin's big game against the Lakers really kicked off "Linsanity".

While dominant at times, Lin has also endured some struggles in this recent hot streak. For one thing, he’s shown he’s not a great three-point shooter. Going into the weekend, he was shooting an abysmal 25% from long range. 40% for a guard is considered decent, 35% is modest, and 30% is bad. Even if you’re only a casual NBA fan, it’s clear to see that Lin has a lot of work to do in that department. And before you write off three-point shooting as only a small facet of the game, the problem is that as a guard, defenders will learn to back off and force him to shoot from the outside. He’s going to eventually need to hit an occasional three-pointer to keep defenses honest and stop them from playing far off the ball to avoid his penetration to the basket … which he excels at, by the way.

But even worse, is Lin’s ability to take care of the basketball. During that aforementioned eight-game stretch, Lin had at least six turnovers six times. Six times. He racked up eight against both Utah and Toronto and added nine more against the woeful Hornets. That’s unacceptable for any player, but even worse for a point guard whose primary duty is to run the offense. Lin has shown the ability to distribute the ball, averaging about nine assists in those eight contests, so he clearly has some skill running an offense. But committing that many turnovers is flat out costly and will eventually catch up to a team. We saw evidence of that in the game against New Orleans as the Knicks lost to one of the worst teams in the league.

In addition to those deficiencies, the other thing that should be taken into consideration is something I like to call the Karl Malone/Gary Payton syndrome. Both were still 20-point scorers when they teamed up in L.A. with the Mamba and Shaq for an experiment that ultimately failed. But as Lakers, their scoring averages dipped significantly. Not because they were bad players, but simply because there were fewer shots to go around. With the Knicks having been without Carmelo Anthony and Amar’e Stoudamire for parts of the Linsanity era, it will be interesting to see how his scoring is affected once all three are playing on the same court. As so many coaches have said, there’s only one basketball. While Lin isn’t likely to fall off the face of the earth, his scoring should take at least a slight hit.

Regardless of all of this, Lin is still a tremendous talent. Not only is he playing extremely well, but the Knicks are winning games. As long as the latter continues, the hype over Lin should and will continue.