HE HAD BEEN asleep in his bed at the Ritz Carlton in Beijing, a stop on what has become his annual summer tour of Asia, when he learned that Houston had flipped his contract, along with a first- and a second-round pick in the 2015 draft, for obscure Ukrainian big man Sergei Lishchuk. In what amounted to a salary dump, Lin was off to join Bryant, the brand-savvy future Hall of Famer whose jersey had long been the most popular one in China -- and the same man who'd famously sniffed to a scrum of reporters, hours before that internationally anticipated Knicks-Lakers game, "I have no idea what you guys are talking about. Who is this kid?"
As the clock ticked toward 3 a.m. in Lin's hotel room, his mom, Shirley, handed him the phone for his inaugural conversation as a Laker. "Oh my gosh," Mike D'Antoni told Jeremy, in his unmistakable West Virginia twang. "I can't believe we missed each other."
The offensive virtuoso who had vowed to ride Lin "like freakin' Secretariat" in New York had kept in touch with his former pupil since fleeing the Knicks. Their bond began when Lin sidled over to him during one practice, early on, and asked, "Should I bring my car over from the West Coast?" ("That," D'Antoni thought, "may not be such a good idea.") It intensified as the coach soon discovered that he could show the point guard moves that Steve Nash, his ur-pupil, used in Phoenix, and Lin could pull them off in the very next game.
Now he was calling Lin only eight weeks after resigning as coach of the Lakers amid discord with, yes, Kobe Bryant. "You hate to miss an opportunity to coach somebody that receptive, that good," D'Antoni says. "He's one of those special point guards."
It's March, and the coach and I are sitting inside a Westin lobby during a free moment at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, which has more than occasionally paid tribute to D'Antoni's work. Under D'Antoni, Nash -- whom the coach would follow to LA -- won two MVP awards. And yet when I bring up Lin, there is a singular nostalgia for that fleetingly collegiate Knicks team, when Anthony was still sidelined by injury and Linsanity was in full swing. "Those three weeks were the best," D'Antoni interrupts, laughing, when I bring up Lin's serene Valentine's Day winner against the Raptors. "Every day was Valentine's Day."
But the reasons love bloomed in New York foretold a doomed romance in Los Angeles. "The majority of the responsibility is on me," Lin will say when asked about problems of fit. "I'm not running from that." Nonetheless, the contrast between D'Antoni and his successor, Scott, is so extreme as to evoke the Bizarro World. Whereas D'Antoni was known for an up-tempo, unstructured, high-pick-and-roll-centric offense, Scott favors an old-school, methodical, Princeton-based attack. Whereas D'Antoni opened the lane by empowering his power forward to let fly from beyond the arc, Scott announced in the preseason that he wanted the Lakers to shoot just 10 to 15 3s a game. And whereas D'Antoni empowered point guards to be CEOs, there was little doubt that Scott would defer to the 36-year-old Bryant.
"I think Jeremy can fit anywhere as a player," D'Antoni says. "He's that good. But he's not Linsanity if you put him just anywhere. If you close the floor on him" -- that is, if you don't stretch out defenses, if you don't leverage his yearning to attack the rim -- "he's going to look mediocre."
"J-Lin is used to having the ball 90 percent of the time, and in my system, you just don't do that," Scott tells me after a recent Lakers practice. "He's had some moments where he's been terrific. But sometimes smart people who get in this system can be the dumbest people in the world."
In Lin's apartment, I wonder whether he ever looks around the league to one of the many winning teams that have installed D'Antonian elements -- from the Hawks to the Spurs to the Trail Blazers -- and salivates. Lin knows that a system can showcase or bury a point guard, more than any other position. And as a free agent this summer, he'll be able to pick a boss for the first time since he chose his hometown Warriors as a rookie.
"To be honest," Lin says, "I don't want to be defined by one style of play. People say, 'You're so much better without Kobe,' but you want superstars on your team. My goal is to evolve my game so I'm not so contingent on any system. Great players can figure that stuff out." By his own definition, he knows, he's far from great. The part that hurts is that it's not for lack of trying. "Shoot," Lin says. "What do you think I'm doing when I can't sleep?"
He visualizes Grizzlies point guard Mike Conley, who thrives without space, and Bryant, who inspired Lin's "point of emphasis" for this summer: midrange shots. Later, when I relay this plan to D'Antoni, I brace for a spit take. But the jobless coach invokes that PG-as-CEO metaphor. "There's trying to run your own company," D'Antoni says, grinning. "But you've gotta be employed too."
"You can't just say that the more you talk, the more you care. That's not reality," Lin says, referring to his leadership style. Joe Pugliese
ANYONE EXCITED BY the idea of Bizarro Jeremy Lin, taking long 2s and spouting mother****er, should take note, though: Although he embraces elements of Bryant's on-court skill set, personality is another matter. "Kobe and I just have different leadership styles," Lin says. "I'm not very outspoken. I might not be the guy who's going to cuss somebody out." His biggest off-court issue this year was an email an incensed neighbor sent to his landlord after the Joshes kicked a soccer ball around his apartment late at night. Lin is the guy who, after giving Bryant 38, saddened Knicks coaches by telling them he'd wanted to announce, postgame, "By the way, Kobe, I'm Jeremy Lin" -- but couldn't bring himself to do it.
"But just because I have a certain demeanor, it doesn't mean you can tell how much I want something," Lin says. "You can't just say that the more you talk, the more you care." Take Bryant's toilet paper tirade from practice. Most infuriating wasn't the expletive-laced insult, he says, or even the fact that Bryant had been taunting him, yelling, "This mother****er don't got ****. He ain't got **** right now. Shoot! Shoot!" It was the fact that Lin's side lost, and that, when he begged Scott for a rematch, the coach wouldn't allow it because he wanted to rest the team before a back-to-back.
Or take the other viral Lakers Vine this season, from a game against the Grizzlies, down one with 24 seconds left. A clapping Bryant, standing near his man on the baseline, screams at Lin, who's guarding a dribbling Conley at the top of the arc, to intentionally foul. When Lin doesn't do it, Bryant sprints across the court, fouls Conley himself and throws a left hook into the emasculated air, basketball's Last Alpha Male flushing Charmin down the drain.
In reality, Lin couldn't hear Bryant because he had also been telling Scott, on the sideline, "We have to foul!" And Scott kept telling him no.
But the clip spread across the world anyway, distressing Lin's parents. And the larger public reaction -- concerning masculinity, toughness and race -- all felt very familiar. "There's this whole thing where it's OK to make fun of certain guys more than it is other guys," Lin tells me. "And Asians are very easy to make fun of. We're the model minority. So everyone can joke about Asians: They're nice people, respectful people; they won't do anything." He thinks about this dynamic often. "People look at me, and they've always jumped to conclusions. They don't see toughness. But how do you define that?"
Lin knows that his story has so many different threads that, at this point, it's an imprecise experiment for isolating the effect of race upon perceptions of manhood. Still, he's been gathering evidence his whole life: on the kids who invariably demanded to guard "the Asian" on the playground; on the fans who yelled "sweet and sour pork" and "wonton soup" at Georgetown and UConn; on the Ivy League opponent who called him "Chink" on the court; on the basketball observers who argued that Golden State only wanted him as marketing stunt; on the racist comments at the bottom of any video or article about him. Lin doesn't hear everything. But he can't ignore everything. And to him, any imprecision in such an experiment fails to mask an even more troubling reality: In 2015, he remains the only such experiment. Just ask anybody to name one Asian-American man Hollywood might cast as a superhero or romantic lead. (I'll wait as you Google "guy who played Harold in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.")
This yawning void is why Lin believes that race shapes his reputation as a hapless turnover machine, even though he has cut his rate down from 21.4 percent in New York to 18 percent (through March 24) in LA. And his reputation as painfully one-handed, even though, per Synergy Sports, Lin's drives left in iso situations now rank in the agreeable 56th percentile two years after sitting in the abysmal 12th. "And why, if someone drives by me, it's like, 'Oh, he's a horrible defender, he just doesn't have speed,'" Lin says. That's a fallacy debunked by D'Antoni, who says Lin "was one of the quickest athletes we've ever worked out."
“PEOPLE LOOK AT ME AND DON'T SEE TOUGHNESS. BUT HOW DO YOU DEFINE THAT?”
- JEREMY LIN
"People just aren't used to seeing Asians do certain things, so it creates a very polarizing effect," Lin concludes. This effect can breed invisibility. As his stock declines, friends argue, nobody seems to care that Lin's 16.2 player efficiency rating is higher than Clarkson's (14.6) and Price's (10.2), and not far behind Kobe's (17.7). But Lin also knows better than anyone how his peak was overhyped -- a celebration of a nonblack hoops hero -- like few others have been. "I might score 20," Lin admits, "and it can look better than the next guy that scores 20."
That is why book agents wanted to meet me. That is why, when the Knicks visited the Heat in February 2012, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade actually argued over who would guard him. And that is why Jeremy Lin goes out of his way to avoid saying the word Linsanity aloud.
"One of the tough parts about being a 'pioneer' or a 'trailblazer,'" he says, making scare quotes with his fingers, bringing out those verbal tongs again, "is who can you talk to that can really relate?
