ESPN NBA

When he was coaching MIT's mens basketball team a few years back, Oliver Eslinger tried to recruit Jeremy Lin to join his Division III team. Eslinger is now the head coach at Caltech and, as someone who has been charting Lin's career for years, finds himself drawn to Lin for the very same reasons he was in 2006.

The legacy of Lin didn’t begin two weeks ago with the New York Knicks. According to Max Preps’ Mitch Stephens, the kid from Palo Alto was a youth league legend who was elevated to the varsity as a freshman. And as a senior, Lin led his high school squad to a state championship (in California, no less) over powerhouse Mater Dei. (Stephens notes that, along the way, he was LINcredible in several other big games as well).

The gist from Peter Diepenbrock, Lin’s high school coach: he has been “making plays and winning games” for a long time.

However, in what seems like no time, Lin has captivated a team, a city, a league -- a world -- and the jump has been astronomical, surprising even those at the highest echelons of the NBA. In terms of a traditional path, he started from the lowest level and traveled such an undeniably long distance to groundbreaking stardom in “Lin years.”

A couple years after he played his last game in a Harvard jersey, Lin took the ball, seized society, and hauled a city and a faltering team on his back. A ridiculous number of NBA reporters, players, and coaches have commented that they've never seen anything like it and are truly rooting for him, from Stephen A. Smith to Tyson Chandler to Reggie Miller to Kevin McHale.

Diepenbrock isn’t as surprised as others. Having taught him from a young age, he knew first hand what Lin was capable of doing even on the grand high school stage. And later, Harvard alum Arne Duncan did as well. Duncan told TrueHoop: “People don’t understand how unbelievably mentally tough he is. You’ve got to think about what shaped him.”

Lin is a competitor and a winner; when a player has won championships and been successful against strong competition, confidence increases. When recruiters and scouts pass on him, motivation strengthens. And when the person is humble, yet remains demanding of his own work ethic, the emotions are contagious. To observe the Knicks now is like watching a tight-knit, go-out-of-the-way-for-each-other college team.

I admit that I'm not as surprised as many others. I also admit that I'm a bit biased because, one, I love watching smart kids succeed in basketball and, two, I tried recruiting Lin to my former division III school in the northeast, MIT. Lin chose not to apply to the non-scholarship school but to follow his Division I playing dream (even though Ivy League schools don't offer athletic scholarships either).

When Lamar Reddicks was an assistant at Harvard, he recruited Lin out of high school and coached him as a freshman.

“He had a very strong desire and was ahead of a lot of freshman I coached with his mental game,” Reddicks said.

Now athletic director and basketball coach at Milton Academy outside of Boston, Reddicks was really excited to coach Lin in Cambridge. “I liked him a lot … he needed to get stronger but he was pretty explosive back then.”

When we first scrimmaged Harvard in 2007, Lin was not the primary point guard and he wasn't rolling off high ball screens and making help defenses look silly. In fact, he had some trouble finishing his drives. But what he did have were high level instincts, heightened awareness and anticipation -- and a motor -- body moving, but more importantly, mind churning.

Though the ball wasn't in his hands 90 percent of the time, he controlled the contest with his mental presence, offensively and defensively. He was lightning quick into passing lanes and could make opponents miss him when he was on offense. When I went back and caught a game live his senior year, he appeared to have matured even more as a leader and, under Harvard head coach Tommy Amaker, had been given the opportunity to succeed. After he dropped 30 points and threw down a jam, LINtraffic, on Connecticut his senior year, Lin followed with 25 against Boston College and 15 at Georgetown (along with a breakaway dunk). The Lin factor was fortifying itself.

ESPNLA.com’s Dave McMenamin and I chatted at a TrueHoop get together in 2010. We both believed Lin could succeed in the league. McMenamin had seen him in the NBA summer league and been impressed with his development, upside and abilities. It was apparent, especially after the popular John Wall summer league contest, that Lin was capable of competing with some of the best. Factor in Lin’s utmost desire to make it (former Harvard teammate Drew Housman says on his blog that Lin believed he would play in the NBA), and we find ourselves smack dab in the center of Lin Nation.

The global disbelief from experts emerges from their sheer surprise, like being caught off guard before one spectacular move. Where did Lin come from? How can this be happening? It can’t be real. He can’t keep it up.

And then the naysayers give in.

The stereotypes, assumptions about his overall game and his Ivy League diploma have added to the phenomenon. His timely opportunity combined with desire, courage, athleticism, social intelligence and past accomplishments, helped him storm to success. Heck, he was close to not even being on the roster but was ready when provided the chance. To get a glimpse of how he stayed ready -- and his skill sets -- Just watch his “Day in the Life.”

And that’s no shock to Reddicks either: “He always finds a way to figure it out. I’m interested in seeing once teams learn to stop him how he’ll make the adjustment. I’m confident that he will.”

What keeps this story perpetuating is the obvious: great performance after another and team wins, as well as in-one’s-face social media penetration. (Look, I couldn’t help but write about Lin, too). We are at the point where the great John Branch is counting the number of Lin stories on a daily basis (via his Twitter feed on Feb. 15). And because Lin is reportedly such a great character to be around, the world is rooting for him, even those folks who lag a few days behind the Lin express. I guess that's no time at all considering the years it took Lin to get his opportunity.

“I’m not that surprised,” said Reddicks when asked about Lin’s unprecedented NBA jaunt. “He’s a kid who keeps developing.”

In the current New Yorker, Carlo Rotella profiles Arne Duncan, who is portrayed as possibly the most powerful education secretary in U.S. history.

Duncan has been making news in basketball circles lately for some comments he made about big changes in NCAA sports, which he says have been giving athletes a raw deal.

Duncan himself knows about NCAA sports, as he was a top player at Harvard (one of his coaches was current Celtics assistant Tom Thibodeau) who went on to play professionally in Australia (where, reportedly, his nickname was "the Cobra").

I had been thinking that Duncan mattered, in terms of basketball, because he was a likely candidate to change important parts of basketball. And that's certainly true.

But reading this profile, it's clear that there's another reason for a basketball writer to concern himself with Arne Duncan. Duncan is defined by basketball. This is a general audience profile of an education secretary, and basketball is laced through every element of the article. Arne Duncan's life story is in many ways a story of what basketball can do.

There's no way to tell the story of Arne Duncan without telling the story of his mother Sue, who says she was asked to teach a Bible study class at a black church in Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood, and found that none of the nine-year-olds she taught could read. She took on the problem in a major way, and since 1961 has been running an after-school program most people call Sue's. "I was the crazy white lady," she tells the New Yorker, "driving around in a blue van full of black kids." The Sue Duncan Children's Center thrives still and has an impressive list of alumni, including I.B.M. Fellow Kerri Holley, education executive Ron Raglin, the actor Michael Clarke Duncan of "The Green Mile" fame and even R. Kelly. (This testimonial, from martial artist Michelle Gordon, is powerful.) That part of Chicago was run by gangs like the Disciples and Blackstone Rangers. The Rangers firebombed the church where the program met. Sue Duncan persevered. "It was face to face," recalls Holley. "She'd say, 'You can't come in here. You gotta leave.' But the gangs respected it. She's here. She's doing what she's doing. She won't back down." Through all of her chutzpah and wisdom, Duncan had a connection to some of the best basketball players in Chicago, and he played with them constantly. When the games were in terrible neighborhoods, kids from Sue's helped keep him safe.

Arne Duncan's mission as education secretary, his stance on NCAA sports, his mom's program, and basketball are all present in this passage from Rotella's article:

Once, when Duncan was in high school, a basketball star he knew from Sue's came to him for help in studying for the A.C.T. test. "He was being recruited by some big places," Duncan said. "He was thinking Marquette, something like that. And we sat down, and he couldn't read. He was a B student at Martin Luther King. This was the year they won the state championship. He was a good kid. He stayed clear of gangs, drugs; his teachers liked him. He did everything right, everything that was asked of him, and he was functionally illiterate. It wasn't his fault. He'd been lied to all his life. We had a heart-to-heart talk, and I had to tell him. And he didn't make it. He went to junior college, but he didn't make it."

Duncan told me another story about the boys at Sue's. "There's a photo of our group, the inner circle from my mom's program, taken back in the late nineteen-seventies," he said, "and some of those guys are dead. Growing up down there, and having friends from the program and from the streets die when I was twelve, thirteen -- that scarred me. It was hard to comprehend. As much as the success stories have shaped me and given me hope, those deaths might be an even bigger motivator. The guys who got killed were the guys who didn't finish high school. It was literally the dividing line between you live or you die. Nobody who went to college died young."

The full version of the article is not online -- only in print. But it's worth seeking out. Some other tidbits:

• No one in the history of the planet has a more impressive pickup basketball resume than Arne Duncan. Playing pickup basketball with Barack Obama is among the most coveted invites in the modern political world, and Duncan has been a regular in that run for nearly two decades. Has there ever been a game more good players hope to play in? If there ever has been it was likely the games Michael Jordan organized in Chicago, when he was playing himself back into NBA shape. Rotella reports that Duncan -- a Chicago native -- was part of those games, too.
• Education has a stat geek issue similar to basketball's. There are big dollars on the line, and new kinds of numbers to help show who is succeeding. In hoops, they're useful to pick the good players and coaches. In education it's mainly about teachers and students. But people aren't sure how best to use which numbers. One economist is quoted pointing out that test scores are very noisy measures of how a teacher is doing (just like, say, wins and losses don't perfectly demonstrate the best coaches). The race is to find a model that measures the teacher's efforts as distinct from the effects of the community and the kids in the class -- the best teachers are often assigned some of the toughest kids, which is as it should be, but unfairly punishes the best teachers. I have a feeling that when there are smart solutions to this problem in education, they'll probably be adaptable to hoops, or vice-versa.
• We are being governed by people who have a belief in common with a lot of TrueHoop readers -- that how you play basketball tells a lot about your character. Rotella calls that "an article of cultic faith in Obama's inner circle." Which I find oddly reassuring.

UPDATE: On the New Yorker's website, writer Carlo Rotella tells of playing pickup basketball with Duncan in Chicago, during the research for his article:

Late in the second game, Duncan threaded the ball to me through a tangle of bodies, then darted between defenders to the basket, his gait becoming ducklike when he forced an unnatural burst of speed. He took my return pass in stride and gently laid it in, completing a pretty little throat-cutting give-and-go. I felt good about it until the end of the third game, when with a few seconds left on the clock and our team ahead by a basket I tried a similar exchange with Duncan and got too cute with my pass, allowing the other team to steal it and sink the winning three.

I could have just held the ball until the clock expired. I felt as if I’d personally let my teammates down and should make it up to them by doing a better job next time and every time after that. Then I snapped out of it. What kind of poltroon runs out the clock in a pickup game?

The prevailing sentiment in Obama’s ballplaying inner circle is that on-court behavior reveals character. But, like the line attributed to the Duke of Wellington about the battle of Waterloo having been won on the playing fields of Eton, this notion doesn’t hold up. Generous souls can become monstrous ball hogs on the court, and terrible jerks will set picks, make the extra pass, and otherwise devote themselves to the greater good of the team.

It is more true, however, that the necessary negotiations and improvisations of pickup ball -- and especially playground ball -- do teach lessons in practical politics.

Duncan then goes on to share the techniques he used to get along as a basketball player in Chicago's worst neighborhoods.

The negotiations for the NBA's next collective bargaining agreement will be mainly about money. (Owners, who have been dipping into their own pockets to keep the fires burning through a frosty economy, want more of it.)

But perhaps the hottest issue will be about a different set of numbers: The age of NBA players. Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, LeBron James, Dwight Howard and the like were once drafted straight out of high school. Four-and-a-half years ago, the NBA declared players had to be one year out of high school before going pro. The result has been a rash of "one-and-done" NCAA players. The NBA has expressed an interest in extending the ban for an additional year, which will be an issue in upcoming negotiations with the player's union.

Meanwhile, a growing number of people are eager for the age rule to be eliminated.

On Thursday, the latter group appeared to gain an influential ally in U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Once a star player at Harvard -- one of his coaches there was current Celtic assistant coach Tom Thibodeau -- and a former professional player in the Australian league, Duncan is passionate about basketball. Speaking to university and NCAA officials in Atlanta, the former chancellor of Chicago's public schools said that the higher education of some basketball players was a "farce."

We spoke by phone shortly after his speech:

Tell me your thoughts on the NBA's one and done rule, if you would.
I focused a lot on the NCAA in general. Can I go through that first?

Sure.
The NBA's rule was really a very minor piece of it.

I think when the student-athlete experience is done well, and the right values are there, it can be an extraordinary experience. It's an opportunity to learn life lessons that are best taught on the playing field or on the court.

I was so fortunate to have those kinds of experiences, that shaped me. You know, the values and the lessons are huge. They shaped my sister who was a student athlete. I just want to make sure that everyone has a chance to do that. I think the vast majority of folks do it right. But I think there are a small handful of places where it's not being done right. With the wrong values. And that is really unacceptable.

So I pushed really hard in a couple areas.

I think graduation rates matter tremendously. If you look just at the NCAA basketball tournament last year, the 64 teams, about 25 percent of the teams, had less than a 30 percent graduation rate. A third of the teams had a zero percent graduation rate for their African-American players.

And then there's another set -- about ten teams in the tournament -- that graduated everybody. 100 percent! White, black ... didn't matter. There were these huge disparities in outcomes.

To me it makes the non-performers even more unacceptable.

So what I propose is that teams with a graduation rate below thirty percent -- I think it's a low bar, frankly -- be prohibited from post-season participation.

Secondly, I talked about what I consider an important trade-off.

Many coaches are barred from working with players in the off-season. To me it's interesting. This is managing to the lowest common denominator, saying you don't trust your coaches. I'd like to trade. I'd like to let them work with their players, their student athletes, in the off-season. Empower them. But hold them to a much higher standard of accountability.

When rules are broken at a university, often the university pays the price. The coach skates, gets off scot-free, and often gets a higher paying job some place else. I think when coaches are doing the wrong thing they need to be personally held accountable for what's going on there. Whether it's being suspended from coaching, saying you can't coach for half a year, two years, or a lifetime ban, depending. I think coaches have to step up. We're going to empower them. But hold them to a higher standard of accountability.

As we develop professional basketball players -- from teenagers into the NBA, in America -- should college be part of that?
What I said was that we need a bigger focus on graduation rates, with a direct look at post-season activity. And secondly, we need to empower coaches while holding them to a higher standard of accountability.

Thirdly, we just need to slow down. I'll give you two examples. This idea of signing eighth graders to a college. I think it's crazy. How can we expect them to choose a college, they haven't even been to high school yet! How can they make an informed choice? It's laughable. We should wait on that until at least the sophomore year of high school.

And on your point, I think what's happening now is so intellectually dishonest. It's a farce. It's not "one and done." They're in class for about three months or four months. Maybe six hours a week. They're really not participating in the life of the university. They're really not student athletes. They're passing through.

This is complicated, in the present construct. I think the model in my mind, that makes more sense, and is more honest, and is much more beneficial to the student athlete, is the baseball model. Where for that tiny time, that 0.001% of players who should be able to go to the pros coming out of high school, Kevin Garnett or Kobe ... let them do that. But for those who aren't, let them stay in college for two years, three years, whatever, so that they're honestly part of the college experience. They're honestly going to class. I think they'd be much more ready to handle the pressures and the temptations and responsibility of being a professional athlete if they've had that experience. I think a lot of these ones and dones ... it's a joke. They're not student athletes. It's intellectually dishonest.

I think they're not mature enough and you see some consequences of that. I want to set these guys up for success, not for failure.

What about if they want to go play in the D-League, or in Europe like Brandon Jennings?
I think that they have the right to do that. Again, I just go back ... when done well, I think that college experience is just an extraordinary chance to learn life lessons. What you see is that often when folks spend that extra year, too, they're all over the college experience and stay three or four years to graduate. Those guys do remarkably well. They come in more mature, handling pressures, as better leaders.

My instinct is that the truly exceptional players ... let them go. Let them fly. But for the vast majority, being part of that college life and environment, I think it's a tremendous benefit long-term. And we should think about that.

About, you mean, getting rid of the one and done?
Yeah. But that was not the focus of my remarks. The NCAA does not control that. I focused my remarks on what I think the NCAA can do. And I think they've done, overall, an extraordinary job of moving things in the right direction. But it's staggering to me that we allow a couple of bad actors to taint their universities, to taint their professions, and to taint the NCAA as a body. There's just no reason to do that.

David Stern has been frank that to him it's just a business decision. Thanks to this rule the NBA gets players who are more marketable, more ready to be good pros. How do you counter that argument?
I don't counter that. He thinks staying in college longer is positive. So we're on the same page. We're not in conflict here.

But you would let players go straight to the NBA from high school if they were LeBronesque.
Yes. That tiny tiny percentage.

Who would determine if they're in that category or not?
I think the market would determine that. If they want to do that, great. If it works out, great. But 99.99% of players don't fall in that category. I'm interested in better serving those guys. I want to give them the kind of quality experience, in the community, in the college, on the court that's going to really help prepare them for whatever comes next, whether that's the pros or getting a good job. Being part of the rich cultural and social life of a university has incalculable benefits.

If folks are doing the wrong thing, you stain the university, you stain the programs, you stain the NCAA.

This has got to be about values. The vast majority of programs, I think, are instilling the right values. I am forever personally indebted for my experience to my coaches and my athletic director. Every day I think about the lessons that I learned playing. I want that to be the norm. I want every kid to have the kinds of opportunities that I was lucky enough to have.

Is there a race element here? People always point out that white sports like golf and tennis don't have these restrictions on what young people can and can't do.
I'm looking at a baseball model. That cuts across races.

Good point. So, let's say we enact your plan, and I go to college hoping to be a pro. And after a year of college, an NBA team would like to employ me, and I would like to play for them. Isn't it almost unconstitutional to keep me from going to play for them?
I'm not so concerned about that second or third year. I'd be open on that. I'm just saying, let's get beyond three months. What I want is for you to really go to class for a year. Really be a part of the academic life of the institution. I want you to really be a student athlete. At that point, I'm open on it. I think one and done is a lie. It's not one and done. It's three months. It's six hours a week of class. It's not honest. It's a farce. And I think many student athletes have been poorly served. You can look at many student athletes who have been denied a better chance to mature. We want to maximize the chance of success.

If we have new rules about needing to graduate a certain number of players to play in the post-season, how will we combat the grade inflation, grade faking, tutors and the like that goes on?
Again, we can't always manage to the lowest common denominator. So, if folks are cheating, let's deal with it. If there's something wrong with the program, put it on the coach. Have some real consequences. Deal with it openly and honestly. I don't want to manage to the lowest common denominator. I want to have a higher bar.

There are so many institutions that are graduating 100 percent of their student athletes. It's possible. People are doing it every day. But to have four teams that graduate not one African-American player? To reward them -- it's insanity. And all these other schools are graduating 100 percent? And we treat all these schools the same, even though they have dramatically different outcomes? I don't think we're teaching the right values there. I don't think we're rewarding the right values there. These guys are having dramatically different impacts on the lives of student athletes. And I want to reward those that are doing the right thing, that are teaching the right values, that are valuing education.

Good. So, are you a Bulls fan?
I am.

So what do you think of the season so far?
Um, can we go off the record?

Former Harvard assistant coach Steve Bzomowski spent a lot of time getting to see Arne Duncan -- the appointee as the next education secretary -- play basketball. He blogs about it at Never Too Late Basketball, and says that one of Duncan's great mentors at college was none other than Tom Thibodeau, who is credited with being the mind behind the Celtics' league-changing defense.

When Arne and [former Utah Jazz pick Keith] Webster came back in the fall, somehow they got the keys to the gym. Many a night I'd come back from being on the road recruiting, midnight, 1, 2 am and they'd be in the gym working out, doing all-out, game-speed shooting and ball handling drills. This was not something that you'd see at Harvard. You know, libraries open 24/7, all-nighters every night. But down in Briggs Cage working out? Nope. Another thing I remember is in pre-season pick-up games, Arne never called a foul when a defender fouled him. Never. I think he saw it, calling the foul, as an excuse he did not want to use if something had gone wrong - missed a shot, lost the ball or something. No excuses. Play through it. Get the job done. Overcome the obstacles, nobody bailing him out. Excuses equated to failure and he just did not see things that way. He was a brilliant player, smooth, crafty, unfettered by any defensive scheme or outside pressure, teaming with Webster to sweep Penn and Princeton early season in our gym; even pummeled a Pete Carril Princeton team 78-54! Earlier in the season, Arne led The Crimson to a near upset at Boston College, a game in which we had a 9 point second half lead, but faltered in the end, 87-86. During one stretch, Arne scored 14 straight points by himself. I mean no one else scored from either team (one being a Big East team). Somehow, on our last possession, we neglected to run the play for Duncan. Our bad.

The season sort of went downhill from there; it was too bad. We lost a couple of games and the coaching staff didn't/couldn't figure out how to get the players going in the same direction as the coaching staff thought it should go. Duncan grew much closer to Assistant Coach Tom Thibodeau (now regarded as the top assistant in the NBA, with the Celtics, and seen as the "guru" behind their defensive schemes). Duncan worked hard in the off-season with Thibs (as we called him) to prepare for CBA tryouts but ultimately played four seasons in the top-tier Australian Pro League.

As I mentioned yesterday, Duncan then went on to win several national three-on-three tournaments.

UPDATE: Duncan sounds like a pickup martyr.