Jeremy Lin, Amar'e Stoudemire reignite under Knicks interim coach Mike Woodson

 

Before his 13-point, five assist, +17 performance in Friday night's 115-100 win over the Pacers, Jeremy Lin had been nearly written off by the New York media. Interim coach Mike Woodson, Mike D'Antoni's replacement, was through to be pulling the offense away from Lin, whose status as a starter was suddenly up in the air.

But not only did Lin retain his starting spot, he facilitated the offense perfectly, helping the Knicks to make over 50 percent of their field goals against one of the top defensive teams in the NBA.

Will that be enough to save Linsanity?

Well, on the court that's a possibility. Off the court, from a merchandising perspective, Linsanity is already fading, according to Zach Schonbrun of The New York Times.

One store, Cosby's sporting goods (which is located right next to Madison Square Garden) said Lin T-shirt sales had dropped from 70 per day to only a handful, wrote Shonbrun.

"As long as they still make the T-shirts, we'll continue to bring them in," store manager Jim Root told The Times. "They're just now going to be coming in the same way other players were."

The manager at the Times Square Modell's had the same perspective.

"I guess the honeymoon has worn off a little bit," August Kuhling told The Times. "There are still a lot of people excited about him. The first few weeks obviously wasn't going to last forever."

Linsanity was alive and well at Madison Square Garden on Friday night, but it seems the market for merchandise may have been saturated.

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The Knicks turnaround has been paced by power forward Amar'e Stoudemire's reemergence, primarily on defense. As ESPNNewYork's Johnette Howard asks, "Where has this Stoudemire been?!"

"But now Woodson's in charge," Howard wrote, "preaching more 'accountability' in every other sentence he utters. And all of a sudden, there was the Knicks defense rising up against the Pacers on Friday, just as it did when it held Portland to just 12 first-quarter points on Wednesday. And there was Stoudemire, right there with everyone else. Suddenly he was moving as if the floorboards beneath his feet were on fire. He was harassing the Pacers' David West and Tyler Hansbrough in the paint and trying to trap them way out on the wings; he smacked the ball out of Hansbrough's hands beneath the rim, blocked a shot, then blew by the Pacers at the other end of the floor for a dribble-drive basket and a dunk off a miss, which Stoudemire punctuated by doing a chin-up on the rim and then hanging there for a while."

Stoudemire has just 25 points and 14 rebounds in these consecutive wins, but as Howard puts it, "... all of a sudden even Stoudemire looks alive."