The scouts are usually wrong about Jeremy Lin. After leading Palo Alto High School to a state title in California, no small feat, the consensus 2006 State Player of the Year received zero scholarship offers.
His dream had been to play for hometown Stanford, but he instead enrolled at Harvard, a non-scholarship school.
Stanford missed out.
Playing for the Crimson, Lin filled up the stat sheet like Andrei Kirilenko, being among the Ivy League’s leaders in points, rebounds, three point shooting, assists, steals, and even blocks.
Did the NBA come calling around draft time this past June? Of course not. Nobody ever gives Lin a chance, but he just keeps showing up.
The Dallas Mavericks, though, did decide to pick the 6-foot-4 standout to their summer league squad, and when the Harvard man was pitted head-to-head against number one overall pick John Wall, he lit him up.
Lin scored nine fourth-quarter points against the athletically superior Wall, repeatedly schooling him in the process.
Given Lin’s success, Mavs GM Donnie Nelson went so far as to compare him to a former Mavericks point guard: “He makes everybody else around him better. That’s a sign of a real player. A lot of times, and we’ve been through this before with a guy like Steve Nash, people have a hard time projecting certain players. I just know every team those guys were on won. Jeremy’s got some of the same characteristics.”
Check out the footage below.
If Lin makes the Mavs roster, he will be the first Asian-American to play in the NBA since Wataru Misaka in 1948.
