What Can Jeremy Lin Do Back in New York?

Few athletes manage to recreate the circumstances of their greatest success as fully as Jeremy Lin appears to be doing in Brooklyn. Of course, few careers have mirrored the trajectory of a roller coaster quite as closely as his has, either.

You know the story. After graduating from Harvard University and going undrafted, Lin exploded onto the basketball scene in 2011: a 23-year-old point guard who came off the bench to lead the New York Knicks for 25 magical games, turning his struggling team's fortunes around in the middle of a lockout-shortened season. Linsanity burned hot and fast: Lin's season ended early with a knee injury that required surgery; that summer, he signed with the Houston Rockets expecting the Knicks to match. They didn't, and thereafter Lin was relegated to a subsidiary role on a series of middling teams.

But the talents that made him an elite player that season in New York didn't disappear during his subsequent four years in the NBA wilderness. He wasn't some shooter who lucked into a hot streak; both his shooting percentage and his accuracy from three have remained consistent. He just needed to find a system that worked for him, like he did in Charlotte last year.

"Some people like my game, some people don't. Some people have certain vision for what a point guard should be, others have a different vision," Lin, now 28, said late last month. "So I go coach to coach, and there's such a different expectation, even though people should know what they're going to get. I mean, I'm the same player."

Now Lin is back in New York City—in Brooklyn, to be more specific, and getting a clean shot at it, on a Nets team that is beginning a significant rebuild after going 21-61 last season (only the historically execrable Philadelphia 76ers finished worse).

Joining him is Kenny Atkinson, the Nets' rookie head coach who previously experienced Linsanity as a key assistant with the Knicks. But even before Lin got off the bench, Atkinson would take time to watch game film with him—of the Knicks, of other teams, of EuroLeague—just to keep the young point guard in the right frame of mind. Now the two are reunited, and for Lin, who has been publicly disparaged by multiple coaches over the past several years, the value of that alone cannot be small. Atkinson couldn't wait, for instance, to talk up Lin's defense when he met with the media on September 20th in Brooklyn.

"He can be a darn good defender with his athleticism and his competitiveness and I think he feels a little slighted that he's not considered a better defender, so we need to hold him accountable there," Atkinson said. As Lin and his supporters—including, notably, his coach in Charlotte last season, Steve Clifford—have pointed out, teams consistently allow more points per possession when Lin is on the bench than when he plays, including, yes, the Knicks.

That 2011-12 Knicks roster didn't have much going for it when Lin took over as starter midway through the season. There was Tyson Chandler, an enormously efficient finisher in the pick-and-roll, at center, and a bunch of three-point shooters in Steve Novak, Henry Walker, and J.R. Smith.

The 2016-17 Brooklyn Nets follow a similar blueprint: the only other significant scorer is center Brook Lopez, who averaged 20.6 points per game last season (though he lacks Chandler's deft touch in the pick-and-roll). Also returning is a trio of strong perimeter shooters in Bojan Bogdanovic, Chris McCullough, and Sean Kilpatrick, who all shot better than 36 percent from three, if not at Novakian levels. Lin's role—and maybe his burden—is to lead them all.

Those Linsanity Knicks came to rely on Lin due to injuries to Carmelo Anthony and Amar'e Stoudemire, and these Nets don't employ anyone with the basketball pedigree of either of those players. So in a way he never experienced with the Knicks, this Nets team will need Lin, and go as far as Lin takes them, for a full 82-game season.

Moreover, Lin may need to be the star for a while. The Celtics, thanks to the all-time heist that was the Paul Pierce/Kevin Garnett trade, can swap first-round picks with the Nets in 2017, and own Brooklyn's 2018 pick outright. This is the Jeremy Lin Show, for better or worse, for the foreseeable future.

So no, things aren't exactly the same as they were five years ago, but even if Lin could plan it that way, he wouldn't want to.

"In no way am I trying to recreate anything, make sure things are set up the way they were," Lin said. "I'm very big on moving forward—that's how I'm wired, that's how I think. So I don't really dwell on the past much. I understood my wide range of experiences from my past teams, and I just wanted to find my best fit. And with Kenny being here, this team where it is, this is a place where I can really go and be myself on the court."

Being himself on the court is one of the primary reasons why Linsanity worked, and why the Lin Knicks, which finished the season 36-30 and failed to get out of the first round, are remembered far more fondly in New York than the Carmelo Anthony team that won 54 games the following season and advanced to the Eastern Conference semifinals.

Linsanity meant Lin with the ball, playing huge minutes—"I'm going to ride him like freaking Secretariat" is what his coach, Mike D'Antoni, said at the time—and figuring out defenses. He created chaos on the offensive end by getting to the basket like few can in the league. But because Lin doesn't fit a certain preset idea of what a basketball player looks like, that's still surprising to some. As one of the few Asian Americans in the NBA, Lin has had to address his background for his entire career, and he did so again at Media Day.

"People are quicker to discount me or say certain things because of my race," he said. "And when I do well, people are quicker to say 'He's so amazing' because of the way I look. Coming out of college, it was 'Oh, he's deceptively athletic'. I don't understand why I can't just be athletic. I'm not sure what's deceptive about it."

The reasons this latest opportunity opened up for Lin are varied: Kevin Durant wasn't coming to Brooklyn to play with Sean Kilpatrick and wait for next decade to see the Nets start drafting regularly in the first round again, and the Nets badly needed a drawing card off the court. To be considered a success relative to his contract—three years, $36 million—he'd merely need to be the effective role player he was for the Rockets, Lakers, and Hornets. This was, after all, the summer of Harrison Barnes signing for four years, $94 million, Evan Turner checking in at four years, $70 million. The Nets are betting, however, that they managed to snag a leading man for supporting-cast money—no small matter when roster construction will be your most pressing issue for the near future.

The preseason has offered a glimpse at the challenges that may lie ahead for Brooklyn. In his debut as a Net on October 6th, Lin scored 21 points in 17 minutes against the Pistons; the team struggled for offense while he sat. Lin sat out Brooklyn's second game, against a Knicks team missing Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah that routed the Nets anyway. Against Miami on Tuesday, Lin again proved effective—16 points, five assists in 24 minutes—but the Nets struggled to defend the Heat, and allowed 121 points.

Expectations for this season are low; Vegas has them winning around 21 games again, and Nylon Calculus has them winning 27. But if Lin and the Nets manage to exceed them, it will focus attention on the Nets like nothing has since their move to Brooklyn, or really during the decades they spent in New Jersey, either. A New York sports editor once told me his Brooklyn Nets stories were less frequently read than his golf stories. He didn't mean it as a compliment.

Lin insists he's a better player now than when he called Madison Square Garden home. He's been hard at work on his shot—he rightly pointed out that the more of a threat his midrange and three become, the easier it becomes for him to get to the basket as defenders commit earlier.

"For me, I think I'm progressing," Lin said. "I know I'm a better player. I may not have shown that statistically, but again, a lot of that is role, and system, and how much the ball's in your hands. But I know I've been putting in work for the last four to five years, since New York, and I know that hasn't gone to waste…. I just want to see how great I can be."

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