Coupled with Jeremy Lin’s wild brilliance and questionable choice of haircuts, he’s one of the most reckless players in the league. Lin is a relentless attacker of the basket, and according to NBA.com, he drives to the hoop about seven times per game and has 523 on the year. Strictly by the number of times he goes to the basket he’s going to get foul calls, and he does.
In his 78 games played this year, Lin’s drawn 108 fouls, according to Basketball-Reference — for comparison, DeMar DeRozan has drawn 258 fouls on 897 drives this year.
After seeing how many times this happened, a fan by the name of Hsiu-Chen Kuei noticed that Lin hadn’t had a flagrant foul called to his benefit in a while. Kuei then compiled a mix of all the times Lin had been fouled on a drive and uploaded it to YouTube under the title “Jeremy Lin: Too Flagrant Not to Call”; it’s received over 1.2 million views in a week.
The video made a valid case, particular in the very first clip when Kobe Bryant creamed Lin on a drive to the basket. Bryant’s clothesline of Lin was called a common foul, but the subsequent play showed Wesley Johnson smacking Lin in the face and causing him to bleed. No foul was called.
It’s been speculated that Lin doesn’t receive those kinds of calls because of his ethnicity, he’s the only Asian-American in the league. While that most likely isn’t the case, the video was convincing enough to have officials come together and dissect it, seeing if they could be neglecting Lin.
They reviewed it and said that they didn’t overlook anything. Furthermore, they stated that Lin draws fouls at the seventh-highest rate in the league among players with at least 1,500 drives to the basket over the past three seasons. Other players with more than 1,500 drives and no flagrant fouls include Reggie Jackson, Tony Parker, Tyreke Evans, Ty Lawson, Kyrie Irving, and Victor Oladipo.
