NEW YORK — There are two things a general manager, a scout and a player personnel director want to be, and that’s to be right. And in a quiet moment, they’ll admit they want to be safe.
So they search, whether it’s basketball or baseball or any sport. And to be safe, the easiest thing is to find someone who compares to someone who has been successful before. It’s no different in basketball. And that’s one of the things that made it so hard to predict the future for Jeremy Lin.
There was no comparison. Long before Linsanity took hold — a burst of hype that has made his Knicks No. 17 the hottest selling jersey in the NBA while rousing fans and media from the around the world — and suddenly there was a player who didn’t compare to another player.
There was no 6-foot-3 Asian-American point guard out of Harvard who had burst on to the scene before. There were no Asian-American point guards at all, and a Harvard grad hadn’t made it on to a roster in more than 50 years.
So they passed. Every team skipped him in the first round of the draft two years ago. They all passed him by again in the second round. He hooked on with the Dallas Mavericks’ summer league squad, got spotted and was signed by the Golden State Warriors. After a year dipping back and forth between the Development League and the end of the Warriors’ bench, he was released. He was picked up by the Houston Rockets and released Christmas Eve before playing in a game.
He was found on the scrap heap by the Knicks.
"There’s no science to scouting," said Miami Heat forward Shane Battier. "That’s the main point. There’s no science. There’s guys who look the part and fizzle out. They’re not NBA material. There’s guys who don’t look the part, much like Jeremy Lin — who is a heck of a player and can play in this league. So that’s the bottom line."
Battier should know, having spent 11 seasons — 11 productive seasons — in the league despite once being regarded like Lin: a marginal prospect. He came with a Duke University pedigree, but also the labels from scouts that dropped him into the second round of the draft and to the fringes of rosters.
"There was a healthy crowd (of) skepticism when I came out. People questioned my athleticism and my ability to shoot the ball and ability to defend guys quicker than me," Battier said. But he found himself the subject of a New York Times [NYT] Magazine story penned by Michael Lewis, who found Battier to be the basketball version of the underappreciated Oakland A’s team he wrote about in "Moneyball."
And that brings us to Jeremy Lin.
The scouts who missed on Lin in the NBA draft hardly were unusual. Lin had been passed over when he came out of high school, too.
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Growing up in Palo Alto, Calif., the son of Taiwanese immigrants, including a 5-foot-6 father who was a computer engineer and a basketball fan (not a player), Lin led his high school team to a state championship. But his efforts to land a scholarship at nearby Stanford or UCLA were rebuffed, so his coach and family sent out feelers to Harvard.
"I laugh when I see certain things, wondering how he got overlooked," said Bill Holden, who was an assistant coach for Harvard and the recruiter who spotted him. "If he was 155 pounds in high school I’d be shocked. He was lanky, decent-size hands, but not great tools."
Holden scouted him one day at an AAU tournament in Las Vegas and saw, well, not much.
"I was not overly impressed," Holden said. "It wasn’t that he played poorly. It was a bad evaluation game; not much competition and his team won easily and he cruised through the game because he didn’t have to work that hard.
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