By Kyle Soppe
“LeBron James is a once in a lifetime combination of size and speed, strength and agility” or “Kobe Bryant is the most clutch player in the 21st century.” We live in a society of rushing to find the next big thing, even while we are still enjoying a current player’s greatness. We cannot help comparing today’s athletes to past all stars, or hoping that today’s preps turn into tomorrow’s household names. So it shouldn’t be surprising that fans and analysts alike are looking to Ivy League schools for the next Jeremy Lin, even while we are in the midst of enjoying a magical ride from the Knicks point guard. Now, I can’t tell you exactly who will be the next Lin, but I can offer a mathematically supported estimate of when such a player will burst onto the NBA scene.
This 23-year old has been beating the odds far before he lit up Madison Square Garden for 25 points in a relief appearance against the Nets on February 4th. As a high school graduate applying to Harvard, Lin was an underdog beginning in 2006. Using formulas typically used in actuarial science, I have calculated the odds of Jeremy Lin getting accepted to Harvard, and proceeding to graduate in four years. I made a slight modification to account for a third variable (his Asian race).
P(A|B) = (P(B)P(A|B)) / P(B). But the adjustment takes place in the denominator, where I will use the percentage of Asian’s in the U.S. with a college degree, in order to create an equation that fits the Lin example. This figure has been estimated to be 48.6%. I will also multiply the answer of this equation by 0.97, the reported graduation rate of Harvard.
In this example, P(B) represents the Asian/Pacific Islander percentage in the typical Harvard undergraduate class (the percentage increased this year to 17.5% . We will use 17% to adjust for the growth since 2006). This is multiplied by P(A|B) which is the average percentage of acceptance into Harvard (a number reported to be trending downward to below 7%).
(0.17(0.07)) / 0.486 = 0.024486 0.02446 * 0.97 = 0.023751
Following that equation, and without even bringing basketball into the equation, roughly 98 out of every 100 people in Lin’s situation have their story end prior to walking the stage at Harvard.
Jeremy Lin, undrafted after four standout seasons with the Crimson, could have called it quits for his hoops career and seamlessly transitioned to a promising future on Wall Street with his degree in economics. But there was no new challenge in going that route, so Lin continued to chase his NBA dream. He was picked up by the Golden State Warriors, an accomplishment nearly unheard of for either a Harvard graduate or an Asian American. Combine that with the fact that only 41.1% of the NBA’s 3,678 players since the 1976-77 merger with the ABA have stayed in college long enough to graduate. How unlikely you ask?
There have been four players from Harvard to make a roster in the NBA, and four Asian Americans (Wataru Misaka, Raymond Townsend, Rex Walters, and now Lin) to earn a jersey.
(4/3678) * (4/3678) = 0.000001183
Combine that with the 41.1% of NBA players that attend four years of college.
(0.000001183) * (0.411) = 0.000000486
For those who struggle with decimals, that is a 1 in 48.6 million chance to simply step on an NBA court with Lin’s background. If he took his ball and went home, just happy to make a roster, he would have been a legend, someone who little kids would idolize for years to come. But when he started his first game for the Knicks on February 6th against the Utah Jazz at the Garden, the line between reality and Linsanity quickly blurred. Lin lead the sub .500 Knicks to five consecutive victories, including outdueling Kobe Bryant, and scored an NBA record amount of points in his first three starts (89), four starts (109), and five starts (136). His run didn’t stop there, as a 17 point and nine assist performance in a blowout win over Atlanta made Lin the first player since the NBA merger to average 20+ points and 8+ assists over his first 10 career starts. To account for this record setting performance, I simply will multiply our current answer by 1/3,678, as Lin was the first player in NBA history to put up stats like these.
0.000000486 * 0.001087548 =0.000000000132
That decimal means that we will find a player who has beat similar ethnic/education/success odds once for every 13.2 billion NBA players. To put some perspective on that figure, divide the number of NBA players since the merger (3,678) by the number of years the NBA has been around (45), and you’ll find how many new players enter the Association on an annual basis.
3,678 / 45 = 81.733
Finally, divide the 13,200,000,000 new NBA players it takes to recreate this Lin story, and I am left with how many seasons (mathematically speaking) we will have to wait for “the next Lin”.
13,200,000,000 / 81.733 = 161,503,656
So before you go rushing to look for the next Jeremy Lin, take some time to appreciate what we are experiencing. Saying this sequence of events is a “one in a million” (technically 1 player in every 161,503,656 seasons) story clearly isn’t doing it justice. Lin’s success story is one that’ll be told, but never achieved by another player.
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