Once haunted by Raptors end, Jeremy Lin now at peace

Jeremy Lin has brought Linsanity to China and he's now at peace with his NBA career ended

It wasn't long after the Toronto Raptors championship celebration that Jeremy Lin said he hit rock bottom.

He scored a total of nine points during the Raptors 23-game playoff run and the reality of his free agency was beginning to sink in. He had once been the talk of the NBA, but now no NBA team was interested in the 31-year-old Lin

It's been almost a full year since Toronto hoised the Larry O'Brien trophy and today, Lin told Sports Illustrated's Alex Prewitt that he's at peace with the way things ended.

In China, Lin is a superstar. He averaged just over 24 points per game and nearly six assists this year for the Beijing Ducks. He was second in All-Star voting behind Guangdong center Yi Jianlian, the Chinese national team captain.

“Out here,” Lin told Prewitt, “this season has been the closest thing to Linsanity in New York.”

Today he sits in quarantine at his home in Beijing. His championship ring sits in a personal safe not far away. For a long time, the ring haunted him.

"I got to the point where I was like, ‘Did I earn it?’ I didn’t contribute the way I wanted, but I was good enough to be on that team and to be an NBA player,” Lin told Prewitt.

But now Lin has accepted how things played out.

“For me, I still have a lot of goals. I still have a lot of things that I want to accomplish," he says. “And I still have time.”