Getty Images/Ezra Shaw

As has been speculated for some time, Jeremy Lin was sent to the NBA’s Development League Tuesday. His absence won’t mean much to the Warriors’ game plan—Lin averaged 1.95 points in 8.5 minutes over 17 games this season—but it marks a significant setback in the process of what at the beginning of the season was one of the team’s biggest storylines.

Lin, who led Palo Alto High School to a state title in 2006, was, by his ethnicity—his parents are from Taiwan—an oddball in the NBA. That his alma mater is Harvard—not quite a basketball factory on the level of, say, Kentucky or Kansas—made him all the more unique.

The Bay Area, with a bent toward individuality and a large Asian community, embraced him from the start. He was sensation enough for The New York Times to publish an extensive profile.

The reality, of course, is that the leap from Harvard to the NBA—even for the first player in Ivy League history to record 1,450 points, 450 rebounds, 400 assists and 200 steals—is dramatic, and Lin struggled to adjust. His minutes have been accordingly scarce; he played in only 17 of the team’s first 29 games while logging the fewest minutes on the Golden State bench.

In the end, even with his backcourt depleted by injuries and nursing a losing streak, Keith Smart could not find a place for Lin in his rotation; instead, the Warriors signed journeyman Acie Law, who is averaging 5.0 points and 1.9 assists in 17-plus minutes per night.

Now, the thing that was once a hindrance to Lin, his heritage—or, more precisely, sterotypes about it—may be keeping him tied to the Warriors. If Lin can progress to the point at which he's worthy of consistent backup minutes, he offers the Warriors something few teams have: instant attention from a large and relatively untapped fan base.

That's not reason enough to keep him around, of course, but it is a nice bonus. And with a kid so willing to improve, and with as deep a base of basketball knowledge as Lin already posseses, it's a low-risk, high-reward maneuver.

Bay Area fans are rooting for him because he's likeable and one of their own, an underdog and an over-achiever. His various communities (be they Asian or Ivy League) are rooting for him because he represents them in a sport in which they boast few faces. 

In the end, though, Lin has shown us that it's all about basketball; play well and you're in, play poorly and you're out. There's a whole lot of people, hoping for a whole lot of reasons, that Lin can make it into the former category.

If it clearly didn’t make sense to keep Lin around for basketball reasons, it does make sense for marketing reasons—many of the reasons listed as positives when the team initially signed him.

It’s why he was sent to the D-League instead of simply being cut.