Sunday, February 19, 2012

Sell high on Linperman

I'm about to see my first dose of Linsanity.
I don't need to see it to know that this bubble, this 15 minutes, will burst well in advance of the NBA playoffs.
So if you're one of those fantasy basketball owners with the foresight, or perhaps desperation, to buy low and cash in on Jeremy Lin's ever-upward swing of the roller coaster (assuming that your league doesn't assign negative points for turnovers), you should be actively shopping him for another productive young player. Or perhaps for a veteran who you think will take his game off of autopilot down the stretch.
Lin wasn't totally made out of whole cloth. He has had some big games during his hot streak. However, you need to put his performance into context, as my friend John Benson would urge.
He arrived in the national consciousness in sort of a perfect storm. He has had his success playing for New York in the media magnifying glass. He's a great story, already the greatest Asian-American player in the NBA and the greatest Harvard grad to play pro ball. Most of all, he stepped into a media vacuum.
The timing was perfect. Virtually nothing else is going on in the sports world. NFL? Nothing more than a few, but still too many, pre-combine reports. Baseball? Pitchers and catchers still hadn't reported. Hockey? Eh? College basketball? In a whirl of mind-numbing conference games that mean absolutely nothing. the ninth-place team in the Big Ten still will get into the NCAA tournament.
NBA? Sure, teams are playing every night, but they're not playing well.
Lin has succeeded by playing full speed against teams full of players going at half-speed. Well, not all. Some are playing at three-quarter speed, and some really gearing it up for the last minute in the few games that have been close.
Need more proof of that. Kris Humphries scored 24 points and had 17 rebounds a couple of nights ago. See? Any player on an NBA roster can do that if he's trying hard in a game this year.
Anyway, you could turn Lin into a far better fantasy player if you act quickly. Don't get stuck, like those silk screeners getting in late on Lin-based T-shirt production. At least some kids in Guatemala will be getting free T-shirts soon.

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