CrushAlot wrote:nixluva wrote:Knicks should've had a team option in his contract. Same thing with Copeland. Knicks ntshould never have let him hit the open market. If they believed in Lin all they had to do was offer him a fair contract right away and be done with it. You never let other teams have a shot at your player. Thing is Woodson and Grunwald didn't really want him. Lin was more of an MDA PG. Woodson was happier with a guy like Felton.
Wasn't Dantoni going to waive Lin before his contract got guaranteed? Grunwald sent him to Erie and he blew up. there was a buzz around Lin as soon as he was signed. In the interview Lin said dantoni was his favorite coach but Lin was followed by grunwald and signed by him.
You and I keep doing this dance and I keep having to prove to you that your wrong about MDA ad your bias against MDA is keeping you from accepting what I keep pointing out to you. MDA didn't have time to work with Lin since he missed training camp and the post lockout schedule was so busy that they didn't have practice days. That didn't mean that MDA has forgotten about Lin. Yes Lin got sent to D league but it was with a purpose. The D league stint allowed Lin to get much needed run in MDA's system and to basically audition for a role as PG before they had to make the final decision on keeping Lin or not.
The entire time Lin was getting special attention from Kenny Atkinson to help bring Lin up to speed.
"D'Antoni said C Jerome Jordan and G Jeremy Lin, assigned Tuesday to Erie of the NBA Development League, would probably return near the end of the month when Davis is back and the team will want to play 5-on-5 in practice" - ESPN
Doesn't sound like a player about to be cut.
Lin said "I'm still making a lot of mistakes, but being able to play through that and build on my confidence and grow as a player was the best thing that could've happened ... and that wouldn't have happened without the D-League."Before I forget, let's give some praise to Erie BayHawks coach Jay Larranaga for allowing Lin to pick up a triple-double during his time in the D-League this season. That had to help Lin's confidence too a bit, right?
Kenny Atkinson is the guy behind the guy.
In the days and weeks before Jeremy Lin became an international phenomenon, the then-mostly anonymous second-year point guard from Harvard was just another fringe NBA player assigned to work with Atkinson, the Knicks’ mostly anonymous developmental coach and no-nonsense workaholic. It was the perfect marriage: an undrafted guard with a dream and undrafted guard turned coach still living that dream through his players.“I can’t say enough about that guy,” Lin says. Lin is averaging 24.3 points and 9.5 assists over 37.8 minutes in six starts, including a 38-point performance against the Lakers, a career-high 13 assists against Sacramento and a last-second game-winning shot against Toronto. It speaks volumes about Lin’s work ethic and professional attitude that he kept himself in shape and mentally ready despite his limited playing time before Feb. 4.
And it also says something about Atkinson, whose job is to keep the non-rotation players ready for that moment when Mike D’Antoni calls on them.
“I mean this guy wakes up at 6 a.m. every morning,” Lin says. “I’ll text after a game at midnight, 1 o’clock when I go home and I’ll say, ‘Hey can I look at those turnovers. Can I look at the upcoming team? How they run pick and rolls?’ And he ’ll have the film ready when I walk into the facility the next morning.
“When I wasn’t playing much, we were working out before practice, and after practice he was picking apart my game, teaching me what it’s like to play in Coach D’Antoni’s system.”
Lin’s rise from last man on the roster to undefeated starter continues to gain momentum. The Knicks, who host the New Orleans Hornets Friday night, have won seven straight games, all since Lin began to see major minutes at point guard.
“There is nobody better than Kenny at developing players," says Minnesota Timberwolves coach Rick Adelman, who gave Atkinson his first NBA job, with the Houston Rockets. “We didn’t want to lose him but going to New York was a chance for him to go home.” Atkinson, from Huntington, L.I., joined D’Antoni’s staff in 2008.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/basketball/knicks/ny-knicks-assistant-ken-atkinson-helping-jeremy-lin-succeed-article-1.1024232#ixzz34OaobrTR
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/basketball/knicks/ny-knicks-assistant-ken-atkinson-helping-jeremy-lin-succeed-article-1.1024232#ixzz34OUBytZQ
Fans thought MDA was ignoring Lin, but that wasn't the case. Sometimes we have to dig deeper to see what goes on behind the scenes. MDA wanted Lin to be developed and clearly despite the lack of practice time they found ways to get that done.
Larranaga said that some guys have trouble adapting to being sent down to the D-League, but that Lin and Jordan were exceptions.“It’s a difficult time for certain guys to get assigned to the D-League,” he said. “You know, they look at it as a demotion and neither Jeremy nor Jerome looked at it that way.
“They looked at it as an opportunity for Jeremy to play in game conditions.”
Lin himself called his time in Erie valuable. He was not unfamiliar with the D-League, having spent several stints there last season with the Reno Bighorns, the Golden State Warriors’ affiliate.
“It definitely helped me because they run the same system in Erie and I think that’s proper development, I guess,” Lin said Monday at Knicks’ practice. “It helped me a lot and Jerome a lot, too, actually, just learning to work together, work the pick and roll, understand the chemistry, the flow, the pace.”
Larranaga said Lin was the perfect teammate during his brief stint in Erie.
“From the first practice, it was noticeable that Jeremy first of all had a personality and a spirit about him that other players gravitate to,” Larranaga said. “He had an energy about him the way he approached practice, the way he approached the travel.
“This is a team he joined and two days later, he’s organizing everyone going to the movies together and organizing what are we getting to eat and then picking up the tab, on a team he had known for two days. He just knows the right thing to do and the right situation and I think that’s why people love playing with him. He’s a great teammate.”
Before and after the game in Maine, Larranaga emailed with Grunwald and Erie GM Allan Houston “just giving them feedback.”
After the triple-double performance, Lin sat out Erie’s next game with a sprained ankle and was then recalled by the Knicks, along with Jordan, on Jan. 23.
Part of the motivation in recalling Lin and Jordan was that rookie Josh Harrellson had fractured his wrist and Baron Davis’ ever-vague timetable remained vague.
“That’s why we brought the two kids back from the D-League and we’ll be able to go three-on-three , four-on-four, maybe even five-on-five, but we’ll have enough to where we can practice,” D’Antoni said then.
6/11/2014 2:39 PM