Is Mike D’Antoni the Key to Knicks Jeremy Lin's Success?

I ran into a post on Marginal Revolution about Jeremy Lin, titled “Is Jeremy Lin a Fluke?”:

Nate Silver says no.  I say that in Mike D’Antoni’s offensive schemes a lot of point guards reap more than the statistics they would pick up on other teams and from other offenses, and since the D’Antoni scheme is not very generalizable, or capable of winning a championship, the “other team” metrics are more or less the correct ones.

Here at the Wages of Wins we have our own thoughts about Lin (more on that in tomorrow’s post), but for now I am much more interested in Tyler Cowen’s thoughts on Mike D’Antoni above.

First, I might ask, If it’s all about D’Antoni’s schemes, why is Steve Nash still one of the best point guards in the league? D’Antoni has been gone for several years, and to my knowledge his successors have changed the system a lot (and, in any case, isn’t Cowen making the argument that they couldn’t? I’m not sure what “hard to generalize” really means). Why didn’t Nash’s performance drop off with D’Antoni’s departure...

Get the rest of this article over at Wages of Wins Journal.