Kyrie Irving (34 points, 9 assists) was named MVP of rookie-soph game

ORLANDO -- Maurice Cheeks initially seemed a bit offended by the question.

The former championship point guard for the Philadelphia 76ers, who was as tough and proud as they came in his heyday, was asked before Friday night's "Rising Stars" showcase game at Amway Arena what he thought about the new golden age of players at his old position these days.

"Golden age?" Cheeks shot back. "Point guard is obviously different than when I was playing. Point guards are able to do more things. They can score, they can rebound, they pass; they do a little bit of everything. In my golden age, we pretty much did one thing. And we had the ability to score, but our job was pretty much to set up our team. These guys' abilities go far beyond that now."

Just consider Kyrie Irving as Exhibit A. If Cheeks needed someone to embody the spirit of the message he was trying to relay, Irving stepped to the forefront. Right on cue. Irving showed style, speed, pizzazz, grit and a million-dollar smile throughout a night when he shined brightest among the league's top young stars to lead Team Chuck to a 146-133 victory in the Rising Stars Challenge showcase that featured the league's best rookies and second-year players.

The No. 1 pick in last June's draft, Irving was a can't-miss prospect who couldn't miss a thing Friday night. Irving made 12 of 13 shots, finished with 34 points, 9 assists and 2 steals to earn the game's most valuable player award -- a distinction that validates his status as the league's future at the position.

The Cleveland Cavaliers catalyst isn't too shabby in the present, either.

"You know, it's kind of unfortunate that it comes in an All-Star Game," Irving said of what he believes was the best shooting display he's ever had in a game at any level. "These stats don't carry over to the season. But at the end of the day, it was still fun to get out there with those talented guys."

Cheeks was the product of a show-me-something-first era of point guards. So it's understandable if he's not completely ready to anoint the league's current crop of young guards as a certified movement just yet. But the facts are the facts. There's a renaissance at the position in the NBA, and the future kept flashing before Cheeks' eyes every time Irving, Washington's John Wall or Minnesota's Ricky Rubio darted up the court, dunked emphatically or dished a behind-the-back, no-look assist.

Defense is only a rumor in these kind of games. But it doesn't dispute the notion that if these guys have the ball moving forward for their respective franchises, then the league certainly is in great hands. What we saw Friday night is just a snapshot of what the league has become at point guard.

Young.

Flamboyant.

Scary athletic.

Imagine if Dennis Johnson had LeBron James' leaping ability. You might have the makings ofRussell Westbrook. Or what if Isiah Thomas' speed and attacking style was meshed withRay Allen's shooting stroke. Those were the sort of hybrid flashes Irving displayed Friday night.

"They're better athletes," said Cheeks, who coached a team that included Irving and Wall. "From the smallest guy to the tallest guy, they dunk the basketball, rebound the basketball very well."

Cheeks, of course, is modestly selling his era a bit short. He shared an era in the 1980s with Hall of Famers Magic Johnson, Dennis Johnson, Thomas, John Stockton, John Lucas and many other dynamic players at the position.

But there's an undeniable youth movement that's spreading across the league now. At least 15 of the NBA's 30 teams are run by point guards with four or fewer seasons of experience. Irving, Rubio, Wall and Kemba Walker represented the newer faces in that group Friday. Derrick Rose and Westbrook, who are both in their fourth season, will headline the class in Sunday's All-Star Game.

Nestled within those units are the likes of Tyreke Evans, Stephen Curry, Brandon Jenningsand Jrue Holiday and Ty Lawson, among others. It led to some bold talk among those who claim to be ushering in a changing of the guard. There aren't many teams in the league that can say they aren't encouraged by the prospects they have at the point guard.

"This class of guys, we have a great chance to be special at the position -- and that's coming from someone [Cheeks] that was special at the position," Wall said Friday. "As long as we continue to grow, get better, watch film and keep figuring out what to do, but we still have a lot to learn, a lot to do."

Cheeks, an assistant with the Oklahoma City Thunder, has seen Westbrook's rapid development from a raw and athletic talent to a skilled and elite catalyst alongside Kevin Durant. Ron Adams, who coached Friday's losing team that included Rubio, Jeremy Lin andBrandon Knight, as an assistant in Chicago has also witnessed Rose mature in three seasons from a rookie to the league's reigning MVP.

"It's kind of an interesting time in the league," Adams said. "All of the guards on our team are very good players and have come along well this season, but there are so many good point guards in this league right now. We have one that I'm partial to, but there's just a lot of great point guards."

Irving is just proving to be the latest product in the NBA's promising and deep point guard pipeline.

Leave Jeremy Lin Alone

 

It's nothing that should bestir the culture warriors. It's just that I'm supposed to have a "take" on this whole Jeremy Lin business and, frankly, I don't have one. So I'm going to write up my take on not having a take. On this one, I'm Bogart in the faculty lounge, a couple of slugs of bourbon and four Gauloises into the evening, waiting for Bergman to finish up her lecture on Derrida and stop by for a nightcap. 

(If you're keeping score at home, that is the leader in the clubhouse for Worst. Casablanca-based. Joke. Ever. Nominations are still open, but damn … )

I think I'm on pretty safe ground in doing this. After all, so far, since Lin's improbable rise to fame and glory with the New York Knicks, we have had so many misbegotten "takes" on the poor guy that it's a wonder he can get out of bed in the morning, much less play NBA basketball at the level he's playing right now. In the New York Times, David Brooks, a man who could drain the fun out of a $200 million Powerball prize, decided to point out that Lin was a dude in flux, as Natalie Portman says in Beautiful Girls, caught between what Brooks saw as the narcissistic demands of his sudden fame and what Brooks believes are the doom-ridden prerogatives of his Christian faith. I swear to some god or another, even the Puritan fathers would have thrown Brooks overboard for being a downer long before they ever passed the Azores.

The Accelerated Age has taken the phenomenon out of the phenomenon of being a phenomenon. It used to have some build to it. It used to take a while. Even the simultaneous ascendancy of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird seems today as though it came to us all by wireless radio. Now, anything great that happens suddenly becomes so freighted with instant significance that the essential parts of it that are not crushed entirely are simply buried. In the case of Jeremy Lin, it took almost no time at all for the phenomenon to become commodified. He's already become a self-contained universe of images, most of which he did not seek, and none of which are under his control. He's been made into a vessel into which people have placed the precious illusions that they'd otherwise keep protected in bubble wrap and romance, deep in their childhood hearts. He's come to symbolize everything about sports that nostalgics need sports to symbolize. And he's trying to learn how to succeed as a point guard at the highest possible level of his sport — and that has to be the hardest part for him.

(In this discussion, I specifically exempt what Lin has come to symbolize to the Asian American community in the United States, for reasons that should be obvious to any fair-minded person. To that community, this is a genuine event and should be celebrated as such — which is why the various racial stupidities that elsewhere have attended Lin's rise rankle as deeply as they do. For the love of god, people, it's 2012.)

Can't he just be a player now, for a while, anyway? Can't he learn how not to turn over the ball nine times in a game? Can't he learn that he can't just pound the ball on the perimeter the way he does? Can't he have some space to figure out for himself and his teammates how things are going to be for the Knicks when they get their entire roster back together and everybody has to adjust, especially him? These are not easy lessons. Can't people simply refrain for a while from using him and his success as an excuse to take their pet theories about America out for a walk around the various green rooms and radio studios?

Of course not.

OK, part of it is the fact that this is all happening in New York, and it's impossible to do anything spectacular in New York without turning your life into a brass band. However, out in the dim lands beyond the Hudson, it really is time for people to step slowly away from the vehicle into which they've turned Jeremy Lin's life — the one in which they use him like a pickup truck to carry What It All Means. One of the great things about this country is that we all get to create our own Americas, which means there are always millions of them operating in the same space. (Critic Greil Marcus once described one of the best of them, the America captured by Bob Dylan and The Band on The Basement Tapes, as "the old, weird America.") Your America may not be my America, and it may not be Jeremy Lin's America. But we have to be extremely careful about blundering into his America because we want to hijack his success into our own.

Long ago, right when he was beginning his career, Shaquille O'Neal once told me, "Look, I know people are going to make a cartoon out of me. The important thing is to control your own cartoon." (This marked Shaq as a mind worth watching.) The construction of the Jeremy Lin cartoon continues apace. He's an example of the Melting Pot, in a country where the situation for most immigrants is bad, and, in many places, getting worse. (For, say, people picking fruit in Alabama, the melting pot is more like a roasting pan.) He's a Man Of Faith, a Tim Tebow for another sport and another season. (Two major differences: Lin hasn't yet put his faith in the street by doing television commercials for it, and Lin can, you know, actually play.) He's the new King Of New York, which has needed a basketball hero, largely because it is New York and it has the impulse control of a toddler, and it wants what it wants when it wants it. He's an excuse for racist performance art, and he's the occasion for yet another tiresome debate over "political correctness."

He's 23 years old.

It is going to take a formidable effort for him to control the cartoon that is already under construction, no matter how flattering and well-intentioned that cartoon may be. It is going to take a formidable will for him to keep from becoming the symbol other people want to make of him for their own purposes. It is going to take great strength to maintain the reality of who he is in the face of all the noise coming from all the folks who want him to be who they want him to be. I wish him that will and that strength. I wish him as simple a life as he desires. And, because of that, and while I have a "take" on what has been done with Jeremy Lin over the last golden month of his life, I have none on what Jeremy Lin has done. His basketball career is finally off to a terrific start — that's all I know and all I need to know. I don't need a symbol. I don't need any more signifying in my life. None of my damn business, if you want to know the truth of it.