In Stitches, Lin '10 Helps Rockets Win Third Straight

As the calendar closes in on the anniversary of Linsanity, Jeremy Lin ’10 had eight points and seven assists as the Houston Rockets dispatched the Milwaukee Bucks, 115-101 Friday. With Lin at the helm, the Rockets score the most points in the NBA, at 106.1 per game, and are sixth in the league in assists, at 23 per contest, led by Lin’s 6.4 a game. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, it was the 11th game in which the Rockets have scored 115 or more points this season. No other team in the NBA has more than seven such games.

Lin left the game with 10:34 left in the third quarter after colliding with Bucks forward Larry Sanders in a scramble for a loose ball near midcourt. He sat out for only seven minutes before getting stitches and coming back into the game. Lin added four assists and four points in a pivotal fourth quarter, during which the Rockets scored 38 points and quickly turned a six-point advantage into a comfortable 14-point lead.

“I just know that when I came back, our guys were flying around with high energy,” Lin said in his postgame press conference. “We were getting stops, just the way we’re supposed to play, the way that we’ve played in the past in some spurts. And then we just tried to carry it over to the fourth quarter.”

Lin recorded four steals for the third time in four games and contributed seven or more assists for the fifth game in a row. After starting the season slow, Lin has come on to score in double figures in six of his last ten games and in that span has contributed six or fewer dimes only twice.

Over that same span, the Rockets have gone 8-2 with their only two losses coming to the Oklahoma City Thunder and the San Antonio Spurs—two top teams in the Western Conference. Along the way, the Rockets posted double-digit wins against the Chicago Bulls, Memphis Grizzlies, New York Knicks, and Philadelphia 76ers—all playoff teams from a year ago.