Of Love and Basketball

by Bobby Davis

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Picture by Chris Cureton

February 19, 2012

Love is in the air. It’s basketball season, and two NBA players help define the complicated nature of love. Jeremy Lin of the New York Knicks and Dwight Howard of the Orlando Magic are the objects of public adulation, with the former embracing a new love and the other struggling with leaving one love for another.

Delirium and Joy

Jeremy Lin is the Cinderella story of the year. Taiwanese, a Harvard graduate, undrafted and barely known, until late January he has been just another marginal NBA player. He played in the NBA D-League, and then briefly last year with the Golden State Warriors, but he was an afterthought on a team that has two young star guards, Stephen Curry and Monta Ellis. No one would have been surprised had he ended up playing for Maccabi Tel Aviv or the Beijing Ducks. He was released by a new regime in Golden State, had a cup of coffee with the Houston Rockets, and then signed with Knicks just after Christmas. He slept on the couches of his older brother Joshua, a dental student at NYU, and of teammate Landry Fields. His $800,000 annual contract was guaranteed only on February 10.

Lin came to a Knicks team desperate for success. One of the league’s flagship franchises, in the biggest media market, they hadn’t won a championship since 1973, but seemed on the way out of an extended period of chaos and incompetence. Since their last winning season in 2000-01, the Knicks have lost at least 50 games five times, and 49 twice more. They have been the NBA version of Daniel Snyder’s Washington Redskins, a laughing stock with too much money and too little sense, throwing millions at mediocre and underachieving players such as Eddy Curry and Steve Francis. With the acquisition last year of All-Stars Amare Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony and superb defensive center Tyson Chandler in the off-season, however, Knicks fans were excited about a return to the playoffs.

In the Year of Hope, the team fell flat, getting off to an 8-15 record and looking awful doing it. The lockout prevented players from getting to know each other. Anthony and Stoudemire have not complemented each other--in fact, they seemed to fight each other for the ball, and neither shot it very well. Both then got hurt and missed an extended period. Coach Mike D’Antoni’s system accentuates the importance of point guards, but the Knicks had no one able to play point guard capably at an NBA level. A few tried; all were awful. The team faced the “revolution of rising expectations” as fans expressed their disgust at yet another mess of a team. D’Antoni was on the way to the unemployment line. Out of options, he gave the kid at the end of the bench the keys to the team. And suddenly, it roared like a Ferrari.

Five games, five wins, without the superstars. The 6-foot-3, 200-pound guard took on the scoring load himself--26.8 points per game, including a delirious 38-point explosion against the Lakers in which he abused aged point guard Derek Fisher. Lin’s 109 points in his first four NBA starts are the most by any player in league history. In the sixth game, in Toronto, he hit a top-of-the-key three-pointer with half a second left to win the game—and 20,000 Toronto fans went berserk. More than that, he got everyone else involved. In the seventh game, another win, he had only 10 points but 13 assists. Rookie guard Ivan Shumpert, who had been tried at point guard, was suddenly more comfortable at shooting guard. Other little-known players such as Jared Jeffries and Steve Novak have played extremely well. The ball flowed and Lin could get into the paint at will and either score or dish off. He is playing with delirious confidence and joy.

Knicks fans have gone crazy, embracing the ingenuous and sweet kid as the team’s savior. Madison Square Garden hasn’t rocked like this since the mid-1990s, and “Linsanity” has become a cultural phenomenon. Not since Yao Ming has a Chinese player captivated the fans. Even other players have been caught up in the madness. The Lakers’ Ron Artest recently ran through the locker room yelling “Linsanity.” (Okay, Artest changed his name to “Metta World Peace” and madness isn’t a big stretch for him. But still.)

Lin’s religious faith and humility have drawn comparisons to the NFL’s Tim Tebow, but Tebow was a star since high school. Lin has always labored in obscurity, and no major-college teams recruited him, but now he is at the center of the NBA universe, the object of even casual fans’ love. Once Anthony and Stoudemire return to prominent roles, his scoring average will fall, but the team has found a triggerman who will make both players better. More important, the sour feelings about the off-season lockout and ragged play of so many teams in this year’s abbreviated season have ignited the entire league. Lin is feeling the first white-hot passion of love with the fans, without reserve or complication, and both are riding the wave.

Indecision and Worry

South of New York, the love between Orlando fans and Dwight Howard is going through some rocky times, and divorce seems imminent. Howard has gotten the Seven-Year Itch to leave the Magic. Although Orlando is coming off the best three-year stretch in its history, including a ride to the 2009 NBA Finals, Howard has soured on the team’s prospects. After months of hemming and hawing, he officially asked for a trade last December—to either the Los Angeles Lakers, the Dallas Mavericks, or the New Jersey Nets, with the Nets being first choice. Although hardly a shock, it has put player, organization, and city in an awkward position—in a year when the league’s All-Star game comes to the Amway Arena in Orlando, built in large part because of the public’s expectation of continued success with a Howard-led team. Celebrity glamor will be coming to this growing but still second-tier city, and the hometown hero wants out.

Howard’s on-court performance hasn’t suffered—apart from his free-throw shooting, which is worse than ever. He works hard, plays with tremendous energy, and leads the team in scoring. He leads NBA in rebounding with 15.1 per game and is fourth in blocked shots. He is easily the best center in the league and was elected to the All-Star game in a landslide. Yet Howard has criticized his team’s effort and makeup of players, and he has complained—after a win—that he needs to get the ball more in the fourth quarter. His easy smile and ebullient attitude are harder to find, and he has grown testy over the constant questions about his future. His stock answer to the question is, “As of right now, I’m here.” When one follower sent a tweet urging him not to go or he’d be as hated as LeBron James, Howard angrily replied, “And if u hate me becuz another jersey u never loved me."

There it is, the issue of love again. Howard is easily the city’s most loved player since Shaquille O’Neal left after the 1995-96 season. He genuinely loves children and spends hundreds of hours a year doing public appearances and charity work. He has never embarrassed himself with stupid behavior. When he attended his first public practice after the lockout, 9,000 fans came out to cheer him lustily and proclaim their continuing faithfulness on banners. Fans started a staydwight.com website, proclaiming, “This is Your City, Dwight!” Like a wife who doesn’t want the divorce from her husband, the team and fans are marshaling arguments to convince him not to leave.

It is unclear what Howard really wants. He actually said that he wanted to go to New Jersey to be “the face of the franchise,” when, course, he is already that in Orlando. Partly, he is frustrated by a team that is very good, but not good enough to return to the Finals and win it all. He has complained that he wasn’t consulted on player acquisitions. Yet the Nets are hardly in a position to outdo the Magic, and his supporting cast there will be worse than in Orlando. They have a billionaire Russian owner who wants to make a splash, and a new arena coming in Brooklyn, but historically the team has been a mess, and they aren’t winning anything in the next couple of years. The Lakers have a terrible bench and aging superstars, with Kobe Bryant playing at a high level but beginning the inevitable decline. They do have the money and will to secure free agents, but even with Dwight Howard, they won’t be in the Finals this year.

Partly, he may be looking at other stars such as LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony who went to glitzy, big-city teams. The simple guy who went to a Christian school may be blinded by the bright lights, and there are certainly those in his camp who are pushing him to enter the world of the glitterati. Unlike Shaq, however, Howard doesn’t seem like that kind of guy. He doesn’t have a big personality or quick public repartee; he doesn’t seem arrogant. He has a close relationship to the DeVos family, who own the Magic.

Rich DeVos, the wise patriarch of the family, recently uttered some words that Howard might be considering seriously. "Dwight is in a good place, and when you're young, sometimes you don't realize that," DeVos said. "The loyalty you develop in a community is always remembered. But if you leave, you don't pick it up in the next town. It's not an add-on because you lose what you had. Maybe you gain some new [love], but maybe you don't. Maybe the net gain isn't as good as you think."

Many believe the Magic won’t trade Dwight Howard. Team leadership hopes they catch fire and make a serious playoff run, and then wow Howard with what really matters to most players: a boatload of more money. Because teams can offer more money to their own free agents than anyone else can, they will be able to offer him $110 million, when no one else can offer more than $80 million. Thirty million can buy a lot of love.