COMMENTARY | Due to some knee tendon tendinitis affecting New York Knicks rookie guard Iman Shumpert, one Jeremy wasn’t seen as part of Saturday night’s NBA slam dunk contest, and another was.
Shumpert was originally slated to compete in the event, with highly popular second-year teammate Jeremy Lin aiding him on his dunks.
Instead, Utah’s Jeremy Evans took Shumpert’s place and walked away with the dunk title, but Shumpert, along with Lin, and another Knick, forward Landry Fields, originally had something quite fun in store for the fans in Orlando and a national television audience.
Fields was Lin’s teammate for Friday night’s Rising Stars game, and he was prepared to help Shumpert and Lin put on an amusing show.
Unfortunately, what the trio would have done wasn’t seen, as Shumpert’s ailing knee forced him to pull out of the competition last Wednesday.
Shumpert was prepared to unleash at least one very creative concept, with Fields pushing out a couch that Lin would have pretended to sleep as Shumpert dunked over him.
After Blake Griffin’s slam over the front of a car last season, that may not sound like reaching new heights in terms of degree of difficulty.
But, given that Lin, in a mere three weeks, had become an international sensation as America’s favorite underdog story over that time, it would have provided one of the more memorable scenes in all-star weekend history, in large part, because of Lin’s well documented rags-to-riches story.
At the beginning of the month, Lin, undrafted out of Harvard, and already been cut by two previous NBA teams, was sleeping on Fields’ couch just before a hot stretch of games launched him from a relative unknown into instant stardom, and ultimately to a comfortable bed in a very nice New York City apartment of his own.
Oh well, if only circumstances were different, the Knicks might have pulled off their most entertaining all-star moment since Krypto-Nate overtook Superman.