Jeremy Lin asks fans to stop trolling Carmelo Anthony after NBA championship win
- ‘What happened, happened, but it’s irrelevant now,’ Lin says of his old New York Knicks rival
- ‘We can celebrate one without cutting down the other’
Fans on social media have been having their fun after the Raptors won their first NBA championship with a game six victory against the Golden State Warriors. That meant Lin – despite only playing 51 seconds to close out game three when the Raptors were already up – now has a championship ring before his old New York Knicks rival Carmelo Anthony.
“Been seeing a lot of shade being thrown towards Melo,” Lin wrote on his Instagram story. “Just wanna ask everyone to stop.”
“Whatever happened, happened, but that’s irrelevant now. We can celebrate one without cutting down another,” Lin added.
“Life’s too short, bball’s [basketball] too precious, and love is too rare these days. You have one life to live. Be gracious, forgiving, loving, servant-hearted.”
Lin became a champion seven years after his “Linsanity” breakthrough with the Knicks in the 2011-2012 season – a meteoric rise that seemed rub some of his teammates the wrong way, with rumours and reports of unrest.
Former Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni admitted as much, saying he struggled to get some of his other players to adapt their games to accommodate Lin.
“It was there, it’s real,” D’Antoni told Adrian Wojnarowski’s The Vertical podcast in 2016. “The problem that we had was that for Jeremy to be really good, which he was, he had to play a certain way. It was hard for him to adapt.
“Amar’e [Stoudemire], Melo [Carmelo Anthony], whatever, had to play a certain way too to be really, really good. So there was that inherent conflict of what’s better for the team? What isn’t? Can they coexist? Can they not?
“And again, they could have coexisted if Melo went to [power forward], which he really didn’t want to and Amare came to backup Tyson [Chandler at centre], which he didn’t want to.
“So now it’s like, what are we going to do? We could see how to go and I didn’t know how to get there and with losing again and you’re trying to prod them and you’re trying to tell them to play harder and all the coach’s speak and communication just like deteriorated.”
It was Anthony in particular, according to D’Antoni, who didn’t want to change his game.
“I had one vision that I wanted him to play one way,” D’Antoni said. “He wanted to go the other way. I couldn’t get to my way.”
Stoudemire also seemed to take a swipe at Anthony’s attitude towards Lin in his own 2016 comments.
“If [Lin] stayed, it would have been cool, but everyone wasn’t a fan of him being the new star, so he didn’t stay long,” Stoudemire said.
“A lot of times, you’ve got to enjoy someone else’s success, and that wasn’t the case for us during that stretch. You’ve got to enjoy that. You’ve got to let that player enjoy himself and cherish those moments.
“But he was becoming a star, and I don’t think everyone was pleased with that.”
