jeremy lin

That didn’t take long. It hasn’t even been 24 hours since the New York Knicks let point-guard Jeremy Lin—as in “Linsanity”—go to the Houston Rockets for US$25 million over three years and already advertisers are pulling out of Madison Square Garden. The 23-year-old Harvard graduate became an international sensation last year—thanks in part to his unlikely story (he went undrafted out of college) and his status as the first Chinese or Taiwanese-American to play in the NBA. The Knicks, however, apparently believed the price of keeping Lin around was too high. We’ll see if they were right.

I took a stab at the Jeremy Lin story when the Knicks came through Toronto two weeks ago. Beyond noting the large number of Asian fans in the crowd, I didn’t really delve into what Lin does or might mean for Asian-Canadian, or Asian-American hoopsters. That was at least partly because I was writing fast and writing fast about something like that is a good way to write something stupid. But it was also because I didn’t really know what I would say. Without going out and doing a lot of in-depth interviews—and not the kind of 30-second ones you get while covering a live sporting event—all I would of have had were my own very surface impressions, and in this case I didn’t feel like those would be worth all that much.

With the Knicks in town to play the Raptors, Linsanity comes to Toronto