“That Dude Trash”: Celtics Legend Reveals How Rajon Rondo Shut Down Jeremy Lin’s ‘Linsanity’

Jeremy Lin recently returned to Madison Square Garden for the first time in 14 years as a spectator. He watched the Knicks chase a championship in the building where Linsanity was born. The reception was warm, nostalgic, full circle. Kevin Garnett's version of the Linsanity story on the Knuckleheads podcast is considerably less sentimental.

Garnett recounted how the 2012 Celtics locker room reacted as Lin's seven-game explosion took over the league. Paul Pierce, according to Garnett, couldn't stop bringing it up.

"Every day he'd come in, 'Y'all see Jeremy Lin, God damn,'" Garnett said. Rajon Rondo wasn't having any of it. "That dude trash," Rondo reportedly told his teammates. "That dude ain't s***. Wait till I see this dude." Garnett's response captured the loyalty of a locker room built around its point guard: "I'm like, you know I'm riding with you. I'm nine-five all day."

Linsanity ran from Feb. 4 to Feb. 20, 2012. Lin's stretch as an undrafted, D-League-bound guard who suddenly dropped 25 points off the bench against the Nets, then 28 in his first start against Utah, then 38 against Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, building a run so improbable it became a global phenomenon.

Boston caught New York, right in the middle of that stretch. And Garnett's account of what happened next was blunt. "We played New York; it wasn't even close," Garnett said. "Rondo was in the zone, and he ate dude. He ate Jeremy. He stopped that little seven-game whatever. We stopped it, and then dude went into a little slide after that."

The box score backed up Garnett's memory. Boston beat New York 115-111 in a game where Rondo recorded a triple-double, and Lin managed 14 points on 6-of-16 shooting, along with six turnovers. It was, by any measure, Lin's worst game of the entire Linsanity stretch.

Linsanity never fully recovered its earlier magic after that Boston game. Though Lin remained a productive Knicks starter for the rest of that season before a knee injury ended his year in late March.

The run had already cemented his place in NBA history regardless. The first American-born player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent to have that level of sustained impact, a jersey that sold out globally within days, and a media frenzy that briefly made the Knicks the most talked-about team in professional sports.

Garnett's story doesn't diminish any of that. It showed how significant the seven-game stretch had become that an entire opposing locker room was talking about a bench player nightly and treating a regular-season game like a statement must be made.

Rondo, for his part, built a career on exactly this kind of defensive assignment. He used length, anticipation, and irritation to disrupt opposing lead guards, a trait that made him one of the more disruptive perimeter defenders of his era despite modest individual offensive numbers most nights.