Lemme count……… still counting… I can't finish. Too many hands raised.
Jeremy Lin was a hit because he practiced, preached and embodied team basketball. Passing, screening out, looking for the open man, sharing the ball – all things that the injured Knicks player he replaced, Carmelo Anthony, was not.
Gimme-the-ball Melo became the big question mark after Mr. Lin's remarkable debut as the Knicks point guard. They won 7 straight, Lin set all sorts of records, became a phenom, and became the first Chinese American player in the NBA. He was a role model, a star, and some kind of modest team guy whose aw-shucks manner didn't hide his smarts as a Harvard grad.
Everyone wondered what would happen when Melo returned from his injury. Could he re-define his role and become a team player? Other players were thriving under the Lin-led team, guided by D'Antoni's concept that there's no "I" in "team."
It quickly became apparent that Mr. Anthony could not adjust. He whined and he pouted. Lin suffered. The Knicks suffered. They have lost six in a row. It got so bad that Anthony was benched for the last quarter of the last game. It became Anthony vs. D'Antoni, but it's really about the heart and soul of a team: Team play vs. individual run and gun.
And in this case, Jeremy Lin embodied the team.
It made so much sense to dump Anthony. But it's the Knicks. So instead, D'Antoni today resigned.
The man who took a chance on Jeremy Lin and turned a selfish, moribund bunch of overpaid children into a cohesive and exciting team, is gone.
Linsanity has turned into Knicks insanity.
I'm just sayin'.
We'll have the latest on the scandal and there are some who describe it like that and fan reaction, tonight at 11. Laura Behnke (in for Rob Powers) leads our coverage.
Also at 11, we're following a massive police search for a mother who took her 7-month-old infant from a hospital in Queens. She apparently did not have custody.
And we're talking tonight to a quick-thinking teacher who, on her lunch break, saved a woman's life. The teacher found the young woman in the bathroom of a restaurant – not breathing. She did CPR and saved her life.
We'll also have the latest from the Republican Presidential campaign trail where Mitt Romney – the man conservative Repubs just can't seem to embrace – lost two big primaries in Alabama and Mississippi. But he still managed to get more delegates than anyone else, thanks to delegate sharing and his victories in the Hawaii and American Samoi caucuses.
Weird that this happens, right? But the "big sweep" by arch conservative Rich Santorum turned into a delegate victory for Romney. He got 41, Santorum got 35, Newt Gingrich got 24, and Ron Paul, who has yet to win a state, got 1 delegate.
Strangest quote of the day today came from Gingrich, who used his two favorite words, "elite media," and blamed it/them for trying to convince America that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee.
I've been trying to deconstruct his statement all day, and I don't mind admitting I'm baffled. He's been using "elite media" for so long it's hard to remember what he means by it. If he means the "elite media" that conservatives view as typically liberal and Democratic, then why would they want Mr. Romney to run against Pres. Obama? The Obama supporters I've heard talk about this discuss how much they'd look forward to an Obama vs. Santorum or Gingrich general election.
Maybe perhaps that in this particular case, with Mr. Gingrich facing pressure from the right-wing of his party to step down so Mr. Santorum can go one-on-one with Mr. Romney, ego is trumping political rhetoric. I'm just wonderin'.
Also at 11, what if you had the chance to go to the food store with a registered dietician? Tonight you do, thanks to our Jamie Roth, who takes us to one of the better markets in our area Fairway and deals with some facts and factoids about food, and they may surprise you.
We'll also have any breaking news of the night, plus Meteorologist Lee Goldberg's AccuWeather forecast. I hope you can join Sade Baderinwa and me, tonight at 11.
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