Jeremy Lin's season lasted 43 minutes and seven seconds last year. Less than an hour, and Lin, who had gone up for a layup, came down hard on the floor. He grabbed his right knee, his mouth gaped in shock, and he shook his head as if he couldn't believe it. Then he started to cry.
In the months that ensued, there were times he thought his career was over, he said. He played only 36 games after signing with the Nets in 2016, and this lag time meant that he would be out of the league for over a year and a half by the time he got back in a game. And even if he did get back, would he ever be the same? There's a lot of time to think when you're watching games on TV.
"There's times where you go through the rehab process where you're like, man, I don't know if my body is going to be the same," Lin, now coming off the bench for the Hawks, said Wednesday at Madison Square Garden. "I don't know if I'm going to get out of this injury and be the same. I don't know what's happening. I don't even know if, when I come back, I can stay healthy. There's a lot of these negative thoughts that can come into my mind and have come into my mind over the last two years, so in a lot of ways, it's like nothing is guaranteed. I'm healthy today but you never know, you never know. The game can be taken away in half a second."
Gone are Lin's signature hairstyles _ it's spikey and cut short along the sides _ and gone too is a sliver of his confidence, something coach Lloyd Pierce said they're working to get back, step by step. They both lived in the Bay Area when Lin was growing up, and Pierce has been following his career since high school.
"I want to get his spirit back," Pierce said. "We've got a guy that played one game last year, played 34 or 35 games the year before that, coming off of injuries _ there's some things there.
"I'm looking to recreate Lin-sanity tonight," he said.
He was joking, but he wasn't. Pierce has no expectation that Lin can recreate that heady time during the 2011-2012 season where the then-Knicks point guard took over the city. But he wouldn't mind some of the Linsanity era swagger back, he said.
Lin, when told about his coach's comments, wanted to make doubly sure that Pierce was joking about the whole Linsanity thing. Lin said he doesn't like focusing too much on the past though there's not much escaping it when you come back to MSG. That's OK, though, because he said there's no more fitting place to make his return.
"If I go through tonight, opening night, and I didn't have a ton of fun _ regardless of whether I play well or not, regardless of whether we win or not _ if I didn't have a ton of fun, if I didn't soak in those moments of being able to play basketball again, then I'll consider this a failure," he said. "I think I'm just going to be really excited, really grateful ... In a lot of ways, I made it. I made it back."
In many ways, life with the Hawks is a completely new chapter. Lin was disappointed with how things ended with the Nets, who brought him on to be the face of the franchise, and then traded him this offseason. With Atlanta, he's starting from the bottom. The expectations are tempered. The first goal is health.
"I always felt like I had unfinished business _ I always felt like I was there for an opportunity that never really came," he said of the Nets. "When you're a player, you put everything into that organization and then whatever they do, however they treat you is beyond your control."
Lin hasn't lost any of the thoughtfulness or candor he displayed when he was a local figure, and readily offers up the fact that he still isn't where he used to be. He's not defeated, though: He's still only 30, he's progressing, and every day is a step closer.
"The toughest things about coming back is definitely getting up to the level you were before, whether it's speed, your rhythm, your explosiveness, your shot, your decision making _ just getting to that place you were before, the longer you're out, the harder it is," he said. "I don't know if they are where they used to be right now, today, but that's all right. I know it's a process.
"I've been gone a long time."
