Linsanity Returns With ‘38 At The Garden,’ The Story Of Asian-American Basketball Phenom Jeremy Lin – Contenders Documentary

deadline.com:

Because the New York Knicks play basketball in the country’s largest media market, the entire hoops universe finds out when anything happens, good or bad, to an underperforming NBA franchise that hasn’t won a title since 1973.

But something more than media clout was at work in February 2012, when a backup rookie point guard named Jeremy Lin came off the bench for a struggling Knicks squad in an early-season game — and quickly became the biggest story in sports.

38 at the Garden, an HBO documentary short released in October, revisits “Linsanity,” the giddy mania that gripped New York City as Lin achieved liftoff with the Knicks and made an impact beyond basketball.  RELATED: The Contenders Documentary – Deadline’s Full Coverage Linsanity was one of those “impossible moments,” 38 director Frank Chi said during Deadline’s Contenders Documentary panel. “A moment when society at large tells a group of people, ‘You can’t do something,’ and then someone comes out of nowhere and just shatters all of it to pieces.” An undrafted, undersized Asian-American signee who played college ball at Harvard, Lin went on a streak of point-scoring, playmaking brilliance over his first several games that helped to change the Knicks’ whole season trajectory.

Almost no one — not scouts, coaches, teammates, sportswriters or fans — saw it coming. Although then-President Barack Obama quipped, “I’ve been on the Jeremy Lin bandwagon for a while.” The title references Lin dropping 38 points on the mighty Los Angeles Lakers and their star, Kobe Bryant, in a statement win on the Knicks’ home court of Madison Square Garden.