LAS VEGAS — Jeremy Lin said Linsanity is in the past, and he’s more worried about the future.
For the Nets’ new point guard, that future is reuniting with coach Kenny Atkinson. That future is having his mentor put the ball — and the team — in his hands and trusting him to lead, the big reason he came to Brooklyn.
“[It’s] a chance to really see what I could do, playing for a coach that believes in me. I have a relationship with him,” Lin said at the Las Vegas Summer League in his first media interview since signing with Brooklyn. “We go a way back, and worked and spent lots of hours in the gym. … Me and him were in the gym for a long, long time. I want to see what I can do as a player, what I can do to help this team.
“I understand what my role is. I’m the playmaker, I’m the point guard, I’ve got to lead, got to be an extension of the coach, and I’m not shying away from that role at all. For me, being 27 now, that’s something I wanted. It’s a challenge I wanted to embrace and I can’t wait to do that. That’s something that appealed to me.”
Lin has spent five of his six NBA seasons as a reserve, and much of his career playing off the ball. But Atkinson — who as a Knicks assistant was instrumental during the shocking run of Linsanity in 2012 — is making him the unquestioned floor leader for the rebuilding Nets.
“I don’t think there’ll be a quarterback controversy,’’ Atkinson joked. “Everybody thinks Jeremy’s best position is that combo guard off the bench. We took a kind of outside-of-the-box idea and said he can be our full-time point guard. I saw it in flashes in New York that he can distribute the ball.
“He’s got great vision. If you look at his attributes, he can play the point guard position and he can defend the point guard position. I see him leading our team. I see him being a great pick-and-roll combination with Brook [Lopez]. That’s part of the reason we got him. We challenged him with that role.”
Both Lin and Atkinson tried to defuse expectations of a repeat of Linsanity, when the guard averaged 23.9 points and 9.1 assists over a torrid 11-game run for the Knicks.
“I’m pretty far removed from that. I don’t forget about it like it’s a bad memory, but for me, I’m so far past that,’’ Lin said. “We’re obviously in a different situation. We’re definitely in an underdog role. That’s no different than any other situation I’ve been in for the most part. We’re just going to keep chipping away, keep working and have fun along the way.”
Atkinson has said he would love for Lin to replicate that form, but the circumstances are completely different.
“That was a little happenstance, all the things that happened around circumstances,” the coach said. “This is a long-term thing and coming to a system that’s a little different to what he was playing [with the Knicks]. It’ll be a little different to him, but he’s smart enough to be able to adjust to a new system, new team. That’s one of the things I trust: his adaptability.”