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Showing posts with label Knicks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Knicks. Show all posts
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
Lin has 13 assists, Knicks run win streak to 7
NEW YORK (AP) — Jeremy Lin grabbed a spot on the bench next to Carmelo Anthony in the third quarter and shared a laugh with the injured All-Star.
"We were just having fun and kind of talking about how we're both excited for when he comes back," Lin said.
Hey 'Melo, no need to rush. Lin and the Knicks just keep on winning.
Lin put aside his record-setting scoring to hand out a career-best 13 assists, and New York got back to .500 with its seventh straight victory, 100-85 over the Sacramento Kings on Wednesday night.
Lin added 10 points, focusing more on his role as a distributor while others torched the Kings for 51 percent shooting. Landry Fields had 15 points and 10 rebounds, while Bill Walker and Steve Novak each chipped in 14 points as the Knicks put seven players in double figures for the first time since April 5, 2009, at Toronto.
"As a point guard, my field goal attempts have been really high and I don't think that's necessarily good," Lin said. "I think it's more of my job to distribute and get people in rhythm."
Lin scored 136 points in his first five starts, most by any NBA player since the NBA merged with the ABA in 1976. His 3-pointer with 0.5 seconds left Tuesday allowed the Knicks to pull out a 90-87 victory in a game they trailed nearly the whole way.
The Knicks (15-15) led this one almost throughout, evening their record for the first time since they were 6-6 after a loss to Oklahoma City on Jan. 14. They host hapless New Orleans on Friday, hoping Anthony will return from a strained right groin.
Lin, the reigning Eastern Conference player of the week, played 26 minutes before checking out for good late in the third quarter.
"We wanted to be aggressive, make it hard for (Lin), but he still ran the team and got assists," Sacramento's Tyreke Evans said. "They made shots. It seemed like they were making everything tonight."
Evans scored 19 points for the Kings, who had won four in a row in New York. DeMarcus Cousins added 15 but shot only 7 of 18 and grabbed just four rebounds.
Already the NBA's biggest story, Linsanity had peaked about 24 hours earlier with the former Harvard guard's winner in Toronto. The shot was replayed on the overhead video board at the Garden, triggering a huge ovation as if it had just happened live.
But Lin would have few other scoring highlights, taking only six shots.
Fans, quite a few wearing Lin's jerseys or holding masks of his face, loved it anyway. They chanted "MVP! MVP!" as he was interviewed on the court after the game and held up signs such as "Lin Your Face," ''Linderella," and — of course — "Marry Me Jeremy."
"It's crazy. Thank you for the energy as always," he said to the crowd.
Then he was peppered with an array of questions usually reserved for superstars, from his thoughts about President Barack Obama watching him, to whether it was time to get a new haircut.
But for Lin, the only focus is basketball.
"I knew him before he was Linmania. He's still the same humble guy," Kings coach Keith Smart said. "The guy has not changed a bit, which is real special for a young man."
Lin played last season in Golden State for Smart, who praised Lin's work ethic and attitude, but never imagined "the perfect storm" that would lead to these results.
"It's good Monday morning quarterbacks are here now, but no one could have predicted this guy being this big in this place here," Smart said before the game.
Lin opened the game with a three-point play, giving him nine straight points dating to late Tuesday, but passed more than shot as the Knicks scored easily in the first half. Lin beat the defense with penetration and dishes to shooters, or by throwing lob passes over the top.
The Knicks led 25-17 after one quarter, then blew it open late in the second. Novak converted a four-point play, Lin hooked up with Fields for an alley-oop dunk, then made a free throw to cap a run of seven straight points and make it an 18-point game. The Knicks closed the scoring when Lin drove and threw a wraparound pass to Tyson Chandler for a dunk with 1.7 seconds left, extending it to 54-36.
"I just thought we played really exceptionally well the first quarter," Knicks coach Mike D'Antoni said. "Just the ball was moving, every time we drew up a play they ran it perfectly. Every time I think there was an opportunity to make a great pass, they did it."
Lin had six points and nine assists in the first half. He found Fields for a layup that made it a 25-point game early in the third, and the Knicks coasted from there.
Notes: Kings rookie guard Isaiah Thomas was booed when his name was announced after checking in late in the first quarter. The names are pronounced the same, but he's not related to former Knicks coach and president Isiah Thomas. "I knew it was going to happen here," Thomas said. "I was expecting something. Spike Lee told me next time you come to New York, you better change your name." ... The Knicks last won seven in a row near the end of last season. ... Former vice president Al Gore and ex-heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson were at the game.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Ecstatic Taiwanese claim Knicks' Lin as their own
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — With only a handful of foreign embassies, and a political leadership forced into international invisibility, it's not surprising that the 23 million people of Taiwan feel their island home doesn't always get the respect it deserves.
Perhaps that's why they're now embracing emerging New York Knicks star Jeremy Lin as one of their own, reveling in his basketball exploits with a passion rare for a place better known for its flat screen TVs and computer chips.
Lin was born and raised in the United States, and his maternal grandmother comes from China, but his parents spent their formative years in Taiwan, and that's enough for people here to see him as a true-blue son of the island.
The Harvard graduate's remarkably rapid rise from NBA obscurity to stardom appeals to the Taiwanese as embodying the virtues they say propelled their island from agricultural backwater to high-tech powerhouse: hard work, devotion to family and modesty.
"Jeremy Lin may not consider himself a Taiwanese, and his success has had nothing to do with Taiwan, but Taiwanese regard him as one of their own," said political scientist Liu Bi-rong of Taipei's Soochow University. "Now he has taken the world by storm, and they are proud and enthralled by what he has done."
Across the 100-mile Taiwan Strait, China too is claiming Lin as a native son, pointing to his grandmother's roots in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang as proof of his Chinese-ness.
He is being touted as the next big Chinese sports star after Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, whose retirement last year has tested the NBA's deep-seated popularity on the mainland.
China's pride of ownership is all too familiar to most Taiwanese, who are constantly bombarded by Beijing's assertions that they live in a political never-never land, lacking all the elementary accouterments of statehood.
The two sides split amid civil war in 1949, and China claims the democratic island as its own, to be brought back into the fold by persuasion if possible, by force if necessary.
Watching Lin's latest performance against the Sacramento Kings at a Taipei sports bar Thursday morning, 22-year-old saleswoman Tsai Shu-fan dismissed China's Lin identification with a barely disguised sneer.
"He is a native of Changhua, where his parents came from," she said. "He is not a Chinese."
Adjusting to China's domineering posture has become something of a cottage industry on Taiwan, particularly since it lost its seat in the United Nations to Beijing in 1971, and virtually all of its diplomatic allies — including the United States — abandoned it for China 30 or 40 years ago.
Its political leaders now have nowhere to travel on official international visits, except to countries like Paraguay and Burkina Faso, two of the 23 nations around the world that still recognize it.
That kind of isolation has helped engender outsized reactions when local people make it big on the world stage. Director Ang Lee became a favorite son for the wall-to-wall acclaim he received when "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Brokeback Mountain" hit the silver screen. Former New York Yankees and current Washington Nationals pitcher Chien-ming Wang was commonly referred to on local television broadcasts as "Taiwan's Glory," and Yani Tseng, the No. 1 golfer on the LPGA Tour for the past year, has given her sport a huge boost on the island.
But only a month into helping transform the New York Knicks from underachieving losers into the NBA's hottest team, Lin looks set to leave the other Taiwanese icons trailing in the dust.
His Knicks games are broadcast not only on sports stations, but also on news channels, which devote talk shows to his exploits once the games are over.
Newspapers have totally forgotten about last month's presidential elections, apparently mindful that filling their pages with Linsanity is a far better bet for attracting readers.
And a English tutoring school is airing TV ads to teach viewers newly coined words like "Lincredible" and "Linternational," noting Lin's cascading global impact.
None of that surprises Tsai, the young saleswoman, who came to the sports bar Thursday wearing a dark blue hat emblazoned with the Chinese character for her new hero's name.
"Lin is the young Michael Jordan, and he has Taiwanese blood," she said. "I am so proud of him."
___
Associated Press writer Christopher Bodeen in Beijing contributed to this report.
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