Jeremy Lin doesn’t know how this season will turn out, either

There’s been this ridiculous “let’s slam Jeremy Lin anonymously” thing coming out of New York lately, some kind of attempt to spin the frustration of some fans that Lin is now gone to Houston. Tom Ziller of SBN rightly called people out on this.

Part of the argument is “we only had Lin for 25 games, we don’t know how good he really can be.” Hence the risk was too big.

To which a very honest Jeremy Lin responds to Will Leitch in the latest issue of GQ: Yea, I have no idea how this season is going to go, either.

“People are always saying, ‘He’s only started twenty-five games, there’s so many uncertainties.’ And I agree. I totally agree. I don’t know how my next season’s going to turn out. The things that I struggled with before last year, I’m going to struggle with next year—there’s that learning process. Just because you have x amount of good games doesn’t mean that you have drastically improved as a player. It just means that what you could do is finally being shown. But I have to get better.”

Lin is honest like that through the entire article. Usually we expect and even applaud a false bravado from athletes — say you’re the best, say you knew you could do it, say your team can win it all. Lin doesn’t play that game.

For example, did he expect that kind of success last season?

“I’d be a huge liar if I told myself, ‘I knew I could do that.’ You know what I mean? That’s not realistic. Let’s just be honest. I had no idea I could play like that. It was as amazing to me as it was to everybody else.”

Lin also again tells the story of how he ended up in Houston — the Knicks didn’t make him an offer even though he wanted to stay (he raves about Knicks fans), so he talked to other teams. Everyone, including the Rockets, thought the Knicks would match, but Lin will make $14 million for a season in two years and that was too big a poison pill for the Knicks. They walked away. If he knew this is how it would turn out would he have handled things differently?

“I might have been a lot more reserved about everything in free agency,” he says—the implication being that he wouldn’t have sought out the offers. “But the thing about it is, there was no other way to handle the situation. I didn’t get an offer from the Knicks, so I had to go test my market.”

Check out the entire article. Or, just go buy the newsstand edition with Lin on the cover. You know you were going to pick it up anyway, if for no other reason than to leave it on the coffee table when a woman comes over to the apartment.