Mike D’Antoni has Jeremy Lin to thank for his gainful employment

The funniest anecdote from these two weeks of Lin-sanity comes from the wife of Jeremy Lin’s head coach. Laurel D’Antoni told the New York Post last week about the bouquet from Mike she received on Valentine’s Day.

She was thrilled, she said—but added, “I wouldn’t have been surprised if the note card said Jeremy instead of Laurel. ... Mike loves his players. Honestly, I wished he would’ve given roses to them.”

And why shouldn’t he? D’Antoni might be watching the Knicks on TV right now instead of coaching them, were it not for those players.

Well, one, actually.

And this is not to downplay what the likes of Tyson Chandler, Landry Fields, Jared Jeffries and, since his return, Amare Stoudemire have accomplished in the Knicks’ return to the limelight. But they were also on the scene when the Knicks were stumbling toward underachievement hell—and while D’Antoni stood alongside, alternately frowning and sighing, looking way more helpless than a $6 million-a-year NBA head coach ever should.

Today, though, nine games and eight wins into the Lin phenomenon? D’Antoni looks much more like the coach the Knicks hired four seasons ago. More like the one who popularized the “seven seconds or less” philosophy. More like the one who made the Suns the team you dropped everything to watch throughout most of the previous decade.

More like the coach for whom the trigger on his break-neck offense has always been the point guard—like Steve Nash, the player most-often rumored to be headed to New York to rejoin D’Antoni (Nash is also the one most logical players to whom Lin should be compared; Jason Kidd joined that chorus on Sunday).

Having Lin fall into his lap gave D’Antoni that new look. Once again, kids, wind and rewind every frame of video of every game, comb through every stat, measure everything that can be measured, but never pretend that pure, dumb luck is never a factor.

The luck of Lin sitting at the end of the Knicks’ bench, when there were simply no other point guards for D’Antoni to put on the floor, saved D’Antoni’s job.

No, there’s nothing official or even implied from Knicks management that the clock was ticking on D’Antoni’s coaching life. Then again, what would you expect? They’re clutching as many horseshoes and rabbit’s feet as D’Antoni is.

An amazing number of people have contributed to the Lin-sanity by ridiculing Lin’s previous NBA employers, as well as every team that didn’t sign him, for their hideous lack of foresight. As if the Knicks themselves knew what a gem they had (but just didn’t feel like playing him for nearly two months). The same Knicks, you recall, that had Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony together on the court and were trying to use Toney Douglas, Iman Shumpert and Mike Bibby to set them up.

Remember, their Jeremy Lin was supposed to be Baron Davis. The Knicks might not have been wrong about it—they just will never know, because when Davis wasn’t ready by the date he and the Knicks had targeted, they were down to the kid who hadn’t been able to stick elsewhere, and couldn’t get on the floor in the Garden.

Poor Baron is still in limbo (or maybe in Lin-bo ... ugh, I am so sorry, that was totally uncalled-for). As recently as Saturday afternoon, Davis told reporters that he thought he would play the next day and make his injury-delayed season debut with his new team on national TV. Millions tuned in and saw that this wasn’t the case ... among other things.

They saw the defending champion Mavs come to town, with at least one player (Jason Terry) still doubting what his eyes told him. They saw Lin do his magic again.

And they saw D’Antoni still on the sidelines.

If Lin had been snapped up by some other team, or if he’d gotten hurt in practice or during mop-up duty, or if D’Antoni had rolled the dice with another point guard, or if any other factor had intervened ... D’Antoni might not have lasted until Davis returned, whenever that might be. Or until the latest Lin miracle on Sunday.

Or until Valentine’s Day. Which, at least, would’ve left D’Antoni’s wife with less-amused ambivalence when those flowers arrived.