Sports fans love to argue and debate over every little thing. One such thing being "if you were building a team and you could pick any player to be on your team, who would you pick first?" While most will say Lebron, and some may say Durant, there is in fact one correct answer to this question, Jeremy Lin.
If you have a team, and you want to make money, you want the player that over a billion fans are fiercely proud of. Houston understood this, when they paid over 30 million for a bench player. Basketball is a business, and they are quite good at business.
Asia is no doubt a huge market for the NBA. This is why Kobe takes an Asian tour every summer, stopping off in different cities to play an exhibition game with some local professionals. And can you name anybody who played on the Houston Rockets with Yao Ming, other than Steve Francis? Well most people in China can. In fact his teammates were on their own billboards, had there own shoes, their own line of clothes, colognes, you name it.
Why? Because in Asia usually tv companies make deals with individual teams to show their games. So all the Rockets games were shown on tv, making every one of the players on the team a huge star in Asia. Meaning if you are a bench player in the NBA making the minimum, you better try your best to get picked up by the Rockets.
Here in Taiwan, Jeremy Lin is both extremely famous, and extremely uncool. His face is everywhere, especially anything having to do with the NBA. While in America Lebron is on the cover athlete for the new nba 2k game, for the asian region it's Jeremy Lin. Have some poster that shows the superstars of the NBA? You better believe that Lin is in the center of that poster.
The reason he is uncool though is partly because of over saturation, but also because of pride. While Taiwanese are happy that a Taiwanese American plays in the NBA, they feel that one reason he is so popular is because he is Asian. They feel that people are just paying attention to him because of his race, and not because of his ability. I can really respect that opinion, while I do know that they just don't understand what it's like to grow up in a country where you are different and marginalized for being different, making his accomplishments quite remarkable.
