There have been many articles written over the past couple of weeks explaining why Jeremy Lin slipped through the cracks on his road to stardom. How could this happen? Most people say it was an understandable mistake for those GMs and coaches who evaluated his talent when he was on their roster (namely Golden State and Houston).

However, Kenny Smith, a former point guard for the Rockets who had a pretty decent career, has a different take on it. On the Colin Cowherd show late last week, he actually called out the GMs and coaches involved for not being very good evaluators of talent.

Click the audio below (Smith talks about it at the 40-second mark).

Here’s the transcript:

To be a great coach or a great general manager, I don’t think you have to be an x’s and o’s person (a great one). I don’t think you have to have a great relationship with your talent. I think that you have to be able to EVALUATE talent. That’s numero uno. If this guy fell off of everyone’s radar, and he’s been in your practice facility there working, and he can do this in an NBA game, you just don’t have a great idea on how to evaluate talent! And so that means you’re drawing up plays for the wrong guys. That means you’re having conversations with the wrong guys!

(After the emergence of Lin), there are guys sitting on NBA benches saying, “See, I’m telling you. They don’t know how to evaluate talent up here!”

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2012 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Jeremy Lin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.