November drew to a close.
The Boston Celtics handed in their first monthly report card: nine wins, six losses.
Those numbers were hardly explosive. To championship contenders like the Chicago Bulls and the Rockets, they even looked a little shabby. But measured against this team itself-a young squad whose framework Lin Qi had personally torn half apart over the summer, forced a high schooler into, and given an entirely new coaching staff and tactical core, a team the entire league had already written off as "rebuilding and tanking"-nine wins and six losses was a solid slap across the face of every cold-eyed spectator.
More important, though, was never the number of wins.
It was how they won.
They were too fast, too wild. They raced all over the court, firing away without restraint from beyond the shortened three-point line, then used an unheard-of switch-everything defense to scramble opposing formations into utter disarray. An untamed disorder ran through their style, but within that very disorder, something was taking shape that felt unfamiliar and frightening to every textbook coach...
The taste of the future.
The Boston media made a complete 180 overnight.
The summer's sneers-"Lin Qi destroyed a playoff team," "picking a franchise cornerstone with accounting logic," "madly stockpiling child soldiers"-vanished without a trace. In their place came an inquiry mingling confusion, curiosity, and a faint excitement:
"Behind the 9-6 record: what kind of basketball is Boston actually playing?"
"That high schooler from Chicago might really be a monster"
"The more you watch Lin Qi's 'general store 2.0,' the more interesting it gets"
A veteran reporter who had spent more than half the year attacking Lin Qi in his column did something unprecedented: he wrote a lengthy article with a decidedly self-mocking title, "We might all have been wrong."
In his writing, the old-school newspaperman made a rare concession. He admitted that he had spent the entire summer using an outdated ruler to measure a spaceship from a new era. He frankly acknowledged that he could not understand Adelman's high-post facilitation, why Lin Qi considered P.J. Brown untouchable when he averaged six points a game, or, still less, why a general manager would keep a bunch of data geeks who did nothing but stare at computer screens on the payroll.
But that 9-6 record stood there all the same. That block on Malone and Murray's torrential quarter of threes had both become indisputable facts.
"Perhaps," he wrote at the end of the article, "that young president in Boston truly has seen a future that old men like us could never reach in an entire lifetime."
Lin Qi neatly cut out the article with scissors and stacked it with the old clippings from the first volume.
But what truly set Lin Qi's blood boiling was never the media changing with the wind.
It was the data company he had built with his own hands baring its fearsome fangs on a professional league's courts for the first time.
At the end of the month, Lin Qi summoned Rick Adelman, Tom Thibodeau, and the entire data analysis team to his office.
Dean Oliver and Jeff Sagarin had deconstructed and reassembled every action from the team's first fifteen games, ultimately compiling a thick statistical report. Its precision made even Adelman, with all his years of coaching, feel his scalp prickle.
On defense: the data proved that Garnett's efficiency at slowing opponents down when switching onto the perimeter ranked among the league's top three... When he switched outside, opposing guards succeeded on just 31.2% of their isolation attempts. It completely confirmed Lin Qi's original prediction to Thibodeau: this kid was a defensive monster who could cover positions one through five.
On offense: the report showed that when Sam Cassell ran a high pick-and-roll with Radja at the top of the arc, or when Radja facilitated from the high post while Sam Cassell cut off the ball and Murray spaced the floor in the corner, the Boston Celtics' points per hundred possessions ranked among the league's best... The power of Adelman's Princeton system had been rendered in numbers.
Stranger still: the report explicitly showed that whether P.J. Brown was on the floor made an entire tier's difference to the Celtics' defensive efficiency...
Lin Qi lit a cigarette. Behind the curling blue smoke, he surveyed this dimensionality-reduction strike against the era with the composure of someone who held an absolute information advantage.
According to the original history, Pat Riley would lure P.J. Brown to Miami the following summer, where he and Alonzo Mourning would form the most feared, iron-blooded interior defense of the late 1990s. Pat Riley's hellish training and defensive system would develop Brown's terrifying switching, post defense, and boxing-out abilities to their fullest.
Pat Riley had once said of P.J. Brown, "He's the kind of player who gives coaches goose bumps watching film every night, while ordinary fans look at the box score and ask, 'Who is this guy?'"
After 2010, when modern advanced statistical techniques matured and data experts comprehensively reconstructed game footage from the 1990s and 2000s in digital form, they reached a conclusion that shocked every traditional fan...
In historical RAPM models that removed teammates' influence and purely measured "a player's net contribution to team defense while on the floor," P.J. Brown's defensive impact consistently ranked among the league's top three. In some advanced models, he even ranked first at his position for his era.
But now, Lin Qi had forcibly brought that "historical consensus," originally belonging twenty years in the future, forward to the winter of 1995.
"These things..." Adelman rubbed the pages of the report, taking a long while to squeeze out a sentence. "After all these years coaching, I can get a general sense from experience and instinct. But you people can actually pin it down to decimal places."
"Experience lets you see the 'general picture,' Rick." Lin Qi smiled faintly, his gaze deep. "But data lets us see the 'truth.' When those two things come together, we can stay half a step ahead of every opponent in the league."
At that moment, Adelman and Thibodeau, two old-school coaches with traditional basketball in their blood, exchanged a look. The doubt in their eyes finally faded completely.
Lin Qi's "fortune-telling philosophy," a full twenty years ahead of its time, was no longer a castle in the air.
The first shovelful of earth had finally been dug from Boston's moat.
But Lin Qi did not even have time to open a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
Nine wins and six losses, the media switching sides, data analysis beginning to bear fruit... It was all wonderful, certainly. But as the man moving the pieces, he understood this team's immaturity better than anyone. Garnett still struggled badly when battling for position inside, the system's rotations frequently suffered elementary mistakes, and their ability to force a breakthrough in crunch time was practically nonexistent.
Those nine victories had come either against young teams on their own level or established, slow-paced teams that had yet to catch on.
The real battles still lay ahead.
Lin Qi opened December's schedule, his gaze lingering for a long time on the name of their first opponent.
The Philadelphia 76ers.
The unfortunate team he had fleeced out of a core asset using Dana Barros and two first-round picks.
Yet the local kid he had personally sent back home as a bargaining chip was now in Philadelphia, furiously making good on Lin Qi's original "sales pitch" to the Philadelphia 76ers' general manager with one twenty-plus-point night after another.
When Lin Qi signed Barros, he had said it: his inability to break out in Boston was not a question of talent, but of not having an unlimited green light. Send him to Philadelphia, give him thirty-six minutes a game, make him the unquestioned centerpiece... and he was a star point guard who averaged twenty points.
Now, history's trajectory had aligned perfectly with Lin Qi's prediction.
That "son of Philadelphia" who had poured in 20.1 points a game against the Knicks in the playoffs, after enduring an entire stifling season of having his talents "wasted" in Boston, had erupted like a volcano with the Philadelphia 76ers. He had become Philadelphia's new Wang, the sole darling of the Wells Fargo Center.
And Lin Qi still vividly remembered the threat he had left at the general manager's office door before departing Boston: "Next season, when we meet again... I'll destroy you on your home court, in front of all of Boston, with my own hands."
That day of reckoning was almost here.
Lin Qi slowly leaned back in his chair, his fingertips tapping lightly against the desk. Looking out at Boston's overcast early-winter sky, he felt a faint, complicated ripple pass through his usually still heart.
He knew that for these young Boston Celtics, this was nothing more than an ordinary regular-season game.
But for him, Lin Qi, it was a "judgment of history" delayed by a year.
Using his foreknowledge as a transmigrator, he had forcibly suppressed for a year the breakout that should have belonged to Barros in Philadelphia, then packaged his bargain contract into the perfect trade chip and exchanged it for the team's future.
On this business chessboard called profit, Lin Qi was the undisputed winner.
But what about Barros? He should have become an All-Star a year earlier. He had helped Boston fight its way into the Eastern Conference semifinals, only to be ruthlessly kicked aside in the summer.
Fate seemed to have traced a vast, deeply ironic circle. It would place the explosive power Lin Qi had forcibly held down back into Barros's hands, with interest.
And the most dramatic way to repay that debt would be to let this discarded wanderer destroy the new army Lin Qi took such pride in, with his own hands, through the cruelest offense, on Boston's home court.
Would history... really submit willingly to being molded by a transmigrator?
That question surfaced once again in Lin Qi's mind.
December's cold winds had already blown into New England. On that night, Dana Barros would carry an entire year's accumulated fury and humiliation onto the floor he had once sworn to defend to the death, and give Lin Qi-and this league-a final answer.
Lin Qi closed the schedule and exhaled a stale breath from his chest. The complexity in his eyes was finally swallowed by a keen edge of eagerness.
"Come on, Dana."
He murmured to himself, his voice as soft as a greeting to an old friend far away, yet also like a declaration of war against that opponent concealed in the void, called "history's corrective force."
"I'll be waiting."