The Jeremy Lin story reached such prodigious heights, to the level of insanity, because he was the ultimate underdog who dared us to doubt him. We did so at our own peril.
We haven't checked in with Jeremy Lin for a while, but it appears he's been busy. Currently in Taiwan, Lin gave an emotional speech at a youth camp recently about his struggles last season in his first full season as a starter. SI.com's Point Forward blog has this excerpt, via a two-hour video on YouTube.
Panagiotis Giannakis, former head coach of the Greek basketball team, arrived in May to begin a four-year contract to lead the Chinese basketball team through the 2014 FIBA World Championships in Spain and the 2016 Olympics in Brazil. As of this writing, however -- following a blowout loss to Chinese Taipei in the quarterfinals of the FIBA Asia Championship two weeks ago -- it doesn't look like Giannakis will survive the month.
Kobe Bryant recently wrapped up his 8th China tour -- another successful one, judging by the response -- and as part of Nike's Mamba Mentality campaign, this ad was recently released exclusively in China.
It's all over but the crying for the Chinese basketball team at the 2013 FIBA Asia Championship after a shocking 18-point defeat at the hands of Chinese Taipei in the quarterfinals today. With Yi Jianlian scoring the first bucket and Zhu Fangyu and Wang Shipeng hitting shots from the outside, China jumped out to an 8-3, then 13-5 lead, and at one point in the 2nd quarter was up by 17. CCTV-5 commentators, openly rooting for China, said Taiwan ("Chinese Taipei") looked like "little brother playing big brother."
Liaoning Whowin played host to Shangai Shenhua on August 1 (yes, eight days ago; sorry, this is late), which wouldn't be worth mentioning if not for a terrible, terrible tackle that might be called straight-up assault if it didn't happen on a soccer pitch. (And if people in real life, hilariously, also could not use their hands.) You can watch it above, or look at the screenshots below to get an idea of how bad it was.
Only three more days remain in the 2013 FIBA Asia Championship, beginning with the quarterfinals today. Can Iran run the tables and finish undefeated? Can host Philippines get past its first-round matchup? Will South Korea's hot streak continue? Is Yi Jianlian completely recovered from an injury that forced him to sit four games?
To help us make sense of it all, here's Nick Bedard of Basketball Buddha.
Kobe Bryant is currently in China with Nike, for the eighth time, to "inspire young athletes." "As a key part of his tour, Bryant will surprise fans by dropping in at various basketball courts in each city to watch players who have heeded the call to come out and play basketball at night," Nike reports, so if you want a chance to meet Kobe, get out there and play basketball on your city's most popular court at night.
Sun Yang -- who might objectively be the best freestyle swimmer in the world -- pulled off a "miracle swim" even for his standards on Friday in the 4x200m freestyle relay at the 15th FINA World Championships in Barcelona.
Check out the video above. When Sun hits the water (lane 8, very bottom of the screen), his team's in fifth place and more than two seconds behind the third-place French. All he does is swim 200 meters in 1:43.96 and beat both the French (lane 6) and Japanese (lane 3) swimmers by a fingertip.
