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BEIJING (AP) — Former NBA star Jeremy Lin, who plays for a Chinese team, was fined 10,000 yuan ($1,400) for criticizing quarantine facilities, China’s professional league and a news report said Friday, as the government tries to stop protests against anti-virus controls that are among the world's most stringent. Also Friday, more cities eased restrictions, allowing shopping malls, supermarkets and other businesses to reopen following protests last weekend in Shanghai and other areas in which some crowds called for President Xi Jinping to resign. Urumqi in the northwest, site of a deadly fire that triggered the protests, announced supermarkets and...

Jeremy Lin has a new basketball team, and it’s far away from the NBA. The NBA champion has signed with the Beijing Ducks in the Chinese Basketball Association after playing with the Toronto Raptors this past season, according to Darren Rovell on Tuesday. It’s been evident for a bit at this point that Lin didn’t have much of a market left in the NBA. Overseas has seemed like his likely landing place for awhile. While he might not be too happy about it, this situation is far from a losing one. Salaries in the CBA can be well north of...

The union won and so did the Knicks. In a bonanza to their free-agent summer, Jeremy Lin and Steve Novak have been granted their “early-Bird rights” by an arbitrator, giving the Knicks more financial flexibility this summer, allowing them use of their mid-level exception on a free agent. Arbitrator Kenneth Damm’s ruling in the case against the NBA means Lin will be able to re-sign with the Knicks with the Bird exception. Novak was also granted early-Bird rights, giving the Knicks the clear edge in re-signing him, too. Without a union victory, Novak was as good as gone. Nevertheless, within...

Isn’t it degrading to suggest that God cares about sports? Isn’t that anthropomorphizing? Are we, like the ancient Greeks with their stories of gods who did all sorts of silly and petty and naughty things, really supposed to imagine that God dons a cheese-wedge upon his head and roots for the Packers? With war and famine, death and disease, doesn’t God have better things to do? Aren’t sports beneath his dignity, unworthy of his time and station? In the process of writing Jeremy Lin: The Reason for the Linsanity (official release date is May 8th), I had abundant opportunity to...

Jeremy Lin's remarkable breakout season may now be over as he will have surgery that will in all likelihood sideline him for the remainder of the season. According to an Associated Press report (via SI.com), Lin will have knee surgery and will be out six weeks. There are only four weeks left in the regular season. So unless the Knicks, who are clinging to the eighth seed in the Eastern Conference, pull a huge upset in the first round of the playoffs, it is unlikely that Lin will see the court again before the 2012-13 season. Since his first big...

Too early in the afternoon for a feelgood story of the day?You know I like to be ahead of the curve, so let me put this out there now: The only thing standing between a Tebow/Lin ticket is about 12 years and that pesky "natural born" clause. (TT was born in the Philippines.) Second look at not asking about birth certificates? A member of Lin's family reached out to Federico via e-mail more than a month ago, according to Federico. After several attempts to get Lin and Federico to meet were scuttled because of the Knicks point guard's very busy...

New York City is no hotbed of evangelical Christianity. Both in geography, and in God-fearing, the Big Apple is a long, long way from the Bible Belt. For example, the city’s sole evangelical Christian college — The King’s College — takes up just two floors in the Empire State Building. But thanks to the trade that will bring Tim Tebow to the Jets, New York will soon receive a religion lesson. At the beginning of February, New Yorkers had no good reason to mix religion and sports. The arrival of Tebow, and sudden emergence of devout evangelical New York Knicks...

I suppose that one could make the argument that the Linsanity phenomenon ended when Carmelo Anthony rejoined the New York Knicks’ lineup earlier this month, but now that Mike Woodson has replaced Mike D’Antoni on the bench, Jeremy Lin’s days of being the team’s offensive catalyst are a thing of the past. Woodson announced the death knell of Linsanity in comments to reporters about the new system he will put in place, one that will see Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire getting the lion’s share of touches and shots. From SLAM contributor Jake Appleman, writing for the NY Times: Woodson ran...

Mike D'Antoni has resigned as coach of the New York Knicks. D'Antoni's resignation was first reported by Yahoo! Sports on Wednesday. The coach's agent, Warren LeGarie, told ESPN The Magazine's Ric Bucher that the parting was "a mutual decision" because D'Antoni and the franchise have "conflicting views of the Knicks' future." D'Antoni put the Knicks through a morning workout Wednesday and had been preparing to coach them against the Portland Trail Blazers. Instead, Mike Woodson is expected to handle that role. The Knicks (18-24) have hit a tailspin in the last two weeks, losing six straight and seven of eight...

Given the media's "Linsanity" surrounding Jeremy Lin, perhaps this was inevitable. Following (justified) outrage over several examples of racially-insensitive coverage of Lin--including a headline published by ESPN.com which resulted in the firing of one staffer and suspension of another--the Asian American Journalists Association has issued a set of guidelines for media outlets salivating over the NBA's Asian-American sensation. "As NBA player Jeremy Lin's prowess on the court continues to attract international attention and grab headlines, AAJA would like to remind media outlets about relevance and context regarding coverage of race," the group wrote in an advisory. "In the past weeks,...

Jeremy Lin's rise to fame has received the attention of many Chinese Christians, and inspires those who face religious persecution in their Communist homeland. Jeremy Lin is not Chinese – his family identifies themselves as Taiwanese – yet he has captured the heart of many people in mainland China, including Christians who are often times persecuted. The Chinese government attempts to control religious practices in China, requiring churches to register and overseeing religious education. It also approves of less than 25 Protestant seminaries and Bible schools with less than 10 full-time employees. Even the Christianity of China's latest hero is...

On February 3, with stars Carmelo Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire at full strength, the New York Knicks lost to the Boston Celtics, dropping them to a disappointing 8 wins and 15 losses. Jeremy Lin, a relatively unknown 3rd-string point guard who’d joined the team weeks earlier, took three shots, missed all of them, and ended up with two points in less than seven minutes of play. As of this past Sunday, when they defeated last year’s world champion Dallas Mavericks on the strength of Lin’s 28-point effort, the Knicks had won 8 of 9 games (largely without their stars) led by the...

Just when cantankerous agnostics thought the NFL finale meant a respite from Tim Tebow, his prayer posture and that provocative name, “Jesus”, who pops up? NBA giant and Harvard graduate Jeremy Lin of the New York Knicks crashes onto the scene wearing a wristband that declares, “In Jesus name I play” and prompting “Lin-sanity.”

Anthony Federico was sacked for writing a caption reading "A Chink in the Armour" on Friday night, following the Knicks' first and only loss since Lin joined the team. Anchor Max Bretos was suspended for 30 days for using the same phrase. Lin has been the source of numerous jokes and puns since bursting to the attention of the sports-loving public last month with a series of record-breaking games. As the first player American-born player of Chinese origin in the NBA, he is enormously popular in the United States and Asia, particularly because he was sleeping on his brother's couch...

New York Knick point guard Jeremy Lin is a one-man economic recovery that even Ben Bernanke couldn’t dream up in his Federal Reserve meetings. Lin-sanity has taken the country by storm and as a result created a spending frenzy that’s benefiting a broad range of companies, tax rolls and even the stock market. Lin’s salary this season is a modest (by NBA standards) $800,000, but by some calculations, he’s turned into the $170 million man. The most tangible impact has been on the market cap of Madison Square Garden (MSG), whose stock has jumped 7% to close Thursday at $31.87...

Jeremy Lin, the ‘Tebow’ of basketball, Shakes Up New York by Mark Ellis, Godreports This faith-filled son of Taiwanese immigrants was given little chance in the NBA. Only weeks ago, he was sleeping on other people’s couches as he struggled to make his start in New York. But after shutting down the Lakers’ Kobe Bryant and leading the New York Knicks to six straight victories, many of his doubters now believe. “This is a miracle from God,” Lin says, about his improbable rise in basketball. “I don’t think anybody expected this to happen.” On February 14th, the undefeated point guard...

During a routine practice with the New York Knicks, Jeremy Lin took a minute to talk to a reporter from Fuse TV about his favorite music. Lin, who makes no efforts to hide his religion, named the popular Christian rapper, Lecrae Moore. Lecrae, whose six studio album, "Rehab: The Overdose," was the highest charting Christian Hip Hop album ever on iTunes and debuted at #15 on the Billboard 200, is already a celebrity within the world of gospel-rap and will perform alongside Hip Hop supergroup, The Wu-Tang Clan at the "Paid Dues Festival" this April. ...A talented rapper from an...

looks like Sarah Palin has gone Linsane, too, the New York Daily News reports: Linsanity became a bipartisan syndrome Thursday, as the former Alaska governor held up a Jeremy Lin shirt a day after President Obama praised the Knicks phenom. Palin, who played basketball in high school, posed with the highly coveted Lin gear outside her Manhattan hotel. Holding up the blue jersey with the already iconic No. 17 stenciled in orange on the back, Palin smiled, waved and signed a few autographs for fans.

MSG Network might be the next media entity to apologize for a regrettable reaction to the success of the New York Knicks’ Jeremy Lin. After Lin led the Knicks to a 100-85 win over the Sacramento Kings on Wednesday, the network displayed a graphic featuring the point guard. Lin’s face was posted above a broken fortune cookie with the words “The Knicks Good Fortune” on a sheet of paper. Lin, who is of Taiwanese and Chinese descent, has been the target of disparaging tweets about his heritage since his play thrust him into the public eye. Boxer Floyd Mayweather said...

Check out the video of the opening of today's Morning Joe. In just over two minutes, the show ran clips of Knicks player Jeremy Lin hitting a three-point buzzer beater last night . . . no fewer than 10 times. But Morning Joe was far from finished. I counted a total of 28 Lin clips during the course of the show. Donnie Deutsch opined that "this is one of the few things where the 1% and the 99% can agree." Mike Barnicle later expressed a similar sentiment. Clearly the Lin story is moving America. But query how long he will...