Jeremy Lin on His Bid to Return to NBA: “I felt like I needed to put my heart on the line”

After spending the past season in China with the Beijing Ducks, former NBA Champion Jeremy Lin announced earlier that he will not return to China in the upcoming season and will bid for an opportunity to return to the NBA.

Speaking to his fans on his personal Instagram last weekend, Lin said that he ‘decided to share my insecurities and fears with the world’. In the 21-minute long Q&A session on Instagram, Lin answered questions about his basketball career in the past, his plans to return to the NBA, and his struggles through his professional playing career.

Lin acknowledged the issues and challenges that he faced as a 10-year veteran in professional basketball: “Not everything is always amazing and pretty and sexy in terms of my career or anybody’s career, I felt like I needed to put my heart on the line and tell the story of what I went through.”

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On his decision to not return to China, Lin said that “this is the toughest decision of my life. Because everything in China was so amazing and I love playing in the CBA and I love playing for the Beijing Ducks, and so it was so hard to leave but I have this NBA dream.”

The 32-year-old basketball player is known as a committed Christian and has been actively speaking out about his faith to the public. “I felt like the thing that required more faith was to put everything that was comfortable that I knew, that I had, that I worked for, to put that aside and go all in for the NBA and so that’s what I’m doing.”

The basketball veteran also said he is seeing changes in his athleticism and has changed in how he sees success: “I definitely think my definition of success is slowly changing because, for me, I’m wired to achieve. That’s just who I am, that’s my personality. I want to do well. I want to do great.”

“Success at this point is definitely a lot more about the journey, how I go about the journey, because time flies. I felt like it was yesterday when I was 21 and graduated from college and now I’m an old man where I have to ice my knees and do all these stretches that I never had to do before and after all my workouts.”

Earlier last week, Jeremy Lin spoke of his journey from not getting a contract in the NBA to being too ashamed to leave his own home on Taiwan’s GOOD TV. Lin also confessed in 2019 on the same show that he felt that he was at his “rock bottom” during the 2019 NBA off-season after not receiving any offers from any NBA teams.

Without going into the details of his future NBA opportunities, Lin emphasized on the importance of combating fear and anxieties. The former NBA player talked about the high and low points during his NBA and basketball career, including his season-ending injuries while playing for the Brooklyn Nets, and his journey in China for the past season. Lin used those experiences and stories to inspire others who are facing other struggles amid the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Following Lin’s departure from the team, the Beijing Ducks signed former NBA Celtics player Jonathan Gibson. Gibson was undrafted in 2010 and joined the Boston Celtics as a part of the Celtic’s summer league team. Gibson is no stranger to the Chinese Basketball Association league. The 32-year-old previously played for the Zhejiang Lions, Qingdao Eagles, and Jiangsu Dragons before joining the Beijing Ducks.