Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Why Jeremy Lin is good

Jeremy Lin is good for a lot of reasons including natural explosiveness, coordination, and spatial ability, but in terms of skills he is good at the stuff they teach kids in camp. He has fundamental skills and abilities that, surprisingly, a lot of NBA players don't:

-court vision: he sees teammates, understands spacing, understands where he is relative to them on the court, understands how to draw and move the defense using the dribble and the pass

-jab step: with the jab step he keeps defenders off balance and can get off 3 pointers and/or get into the lane

-passing: he is a great passer, and all of a sudden the whole Knicks team is passing well

This is the stuff they teach you in basketball camp, the stuff they say to practice that 1 guy in 100 (including a guy named Jordan) actually follows through on and that is absent in many NBA players.

Incidentally, this is why the US national team lost so many games to foreign teams in the past few decades including the Olympics. Teams like Argentina, Spain, Italy stick to the basics. All they do is pick and roll, all they play is team basketball.

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