Jeremy Lin’s one-week rise from backup to the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Eastern Conference Player of the Week helped drive shares in his boss, Madison Square garden Co., to a record high and produced the league’s best-selling jersey.
Since the beginning of the weekend, the Modell’s Sporting Goods Inc. outlet on 34th Street and Broadway in Midtown Manhattan, near the Knicks’s home court, has run through multiple shipments of Lin gear, including his No. 17 jersey and T-shirts celebrating “Linsanity,” the catch phrase adopted by the team since the Asian-American Harvard University graduate led the club to a season-best five straight wins in eight days.
The jersey is the NBA’s top online seller since February 4, when Lin first dazzled NBA fans. Sales of Knicks merchandise are higher than any other team in the league since then, accounting for five of the 10 most popular items.
“Just last week I was reading in the paper about him for the first time,” Miguel Gutierrez, the 28-year-old assistant manager at Modell’s, said in an interview. “I didn’t see this coming. We’re pretty much going to be getting new stuff every day.”
Lin, a 23-year-old second-year player, was cut by the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets before joining the Knicks on December 27.
He introduced himself to Garden fans with a 25-point, seven-assist performance in a February 4 win over the New Jersey Nets, playing extended minutes for the first time with the team.
Streak continues
Two days later he had 28 points and eight assists against the Utah Jazz, the first player since Isiah Thomas in 1981 to reach those numbers in his first career start.
He followed with a 23-point, 10-assist game against former No. 1 draft pick John Wall and the Washington Wizards before eclipsing five-time NBA champion Kobe Bryant with a 38-point, seven-assist performance against the Los Angeles Lakers on February 10.
No other player in NBA history has scored at least 20 points and collected seven assists in his first four starts, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
The Knicks’ average household television rating is up 70 percent since Lin, who was named the NBA’s Eastern Conference Player of the Week, moved into the starting lineup. The win at the Minnesota Timberwolves on February 11 was the highest rated on MSG since Carmelo Anthony’s February 2011 debut with the team.
Shares in Madison Square Garden, which also owns the National Hockey League’s New York Rangers, climbed 3.8 percent to $32.32 on Monday afternoon after trading at a record-high $33.18 in the morning. It’s up 10 percent since February 3, the day before the team’s winning run began. Madison Square Garden, now valued at $2.45 billion, was spun off by Cablevision Systems Corp. in February 2010.
Buy Time
“We even talked about buying MSG stock because of him,” said Li Ouyang, a Manhattan resident who bought a white Lin kids’ jersey for $39.99 even though she said she’s not a big basketball fan. “We should have done that before the Lakers game.”
Lin’s play might help Madison Square Garden shares by bringing an end to the programming-fee standoff between the company and Time Warner Cable Inc., according to David Joyce, an analyst at Miller Tabak & Co. in New York. Time Warner Cable’s 2.8 million MSG subscribers lost access to the channels on January 1, with the two sides haggling over prices.
“Shares keep going up because he’s come on and is doing a great job,” said Joyce.
