February 17, 2012

As unheralded point guard Jeremy Lin leads his team to seven straight wins, the New York Knicks and the NBA are the beneficiaries of an explosion of interest in media, social media and merchandise sales.

The perfect storm of implications and impacts of Lin’s meteoric rise in the #1 U.S. media market has been the single biggest sport business storyline of the week throughout the NBA; impressive for an athlete making $788,000 per year in a league of $15-25 million a year superstars.

“There have been athletes who have made their mark and become stars as draft afterthoughts or even as undrafted players, but I’m not sure anyone has quite come out of nowhere as bullishly as has Jeremy Lin,” said Tom Mayenknecht, founder and host of The Sport Market heard on TSN Radio and TEAM Radio. “The perfect storm of buzz has been created by the seven-game winning streak and the nature of some of his buzzer-beating contributions and scoring totals, combined with his Asian-American background and the context of his rise in the Big Apple. Those factors are what help make Lin a sensation on several fronts.”

On the court, Lin became the first player in NBA history to post at least 20 points and seven assists in his first four starts. Cut by two other NBA teams (the Houston Rockets and the Golden State Warriors) before signing on with the Knicks. Lin is the first Harvard University graduate to play in the league since Ed Smith in 1954. The last Ivy League product to make a mark in the NBA was Chris Dudley of Yale University nine years ago.

Off the court, Lin has made many forget the NBA lockout that cancelled 32 games and aired the dirty laundry of vitriol from both league owners and players for five months. The stock value of MSG, the parent company of the New York Knicks, has risen on the strength of Linsanity and thanks to the Lin-led winning streak and the presence of stars such as Carmelo Antony and Amar’e Stoudemire, the franchise has become a factor in the NBA conversation for the first time since Patrick Ewing and the Knicks of the mid-1990s.

MSG (Madison Square Garden) Network posted its largest audience of the season, at 427,015 with Lin and the Knicks playing the Toronto Raptors and looking for their sixth straight win. Even without Time Warner distribution, Knicks telecasts are up 69% this season and 109% since Lin’s arrival February 4th.

Asian-American audiences watching Knicks games have climbed 967% since Lin began starting for the Knicks. When the Knicks beat Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers, Lin scored 1.2 million Twitter mentions.

Pre-Lin, the Knicks accounted for 17% of the tickets traded on StubHub. Since Linsanity, the Knicks are commanding 52% of the traffic.

Thanks to Linsanity, Taiwan now ranks third behind only the U.S. and Canada in NBA merchandise sales according to NBAStore.com. The online merchandising arm has distributed merchandise to 22 countries since February 4th. At Modell’s sports store in Manhattan, owner Mitchell Modell has ordered 168,000 Jeremy Lin items (as of Thursday, February 16th). A game-worn jersey (from Dec. 28th, 2011) has fetched $40,000 and there are close to 12,000 Lin items on eBay.com, meaning an auction every three minutes relates to the Knicks’ point guard.

Nike is scrambling to execute its first sponsorship activation around Lin, partnering with FootLocker to promote Lin’s Linsanity T’s.

Media comparisons have run rampant, especially those equating Lin’s story to that of Tim Tebow, the Denver Broncos quarterback who came off the bench to help lead his team to the second round of the NFL playoffs, admittedly in unusual fashion as an unconventional quarterback.

“There are obvious similarities given their evangelical religious beliefs and how both Tebow and Lin have impacted their respective teams, but the differences are very real and profound,” said Mayenknecht. “Tebow was a star coming into the NFL as one of the biggest college football success stories in history. Lin had none of that coming into the NBA. He is the much truer underdog story.”
Even Lin himself resisted the comparisons to Tebow.

“I think our stories are different in a lot of different ways,” said Lin. “I respect him and I respect what he did. I’m a fan of Tebow, I’m not really afraid to say that, but I don’t know if our stories are necessarily comparable.”

Nicolaus Mills of The Guardian placed his focus on what he considers to be Lin’s biggest achievement: His style of team play.

“Lin’s breakthrough stems from his challenge to one-on-one basketball in which teammates are turned into acolytes,” wrote Mills at the guardian.co.uk. “The Knicks success since Lin became the team’s starting point guard arises from his distributing the ball to teammates and not just from his shooting….(with) Lin drawing them into the game, the second-tier players took on a life of their own. They passed to one another, looked for the open man when it came time to shoot, and helped out on defense. As a result they won.”

TheSportMarket.biz with files by Darren Rovell of CNBC and Nicolaus Mills of The Guardian.