I cannot remember the last time I was paying such close attention to the NBA. And not just the Lakers. The whole league.

(And yes, I am the same guy who three months ago wrote on this blog that the locked-out NBA could take the season off, for all I cared.)

I am more interested, more engaged, watching the standings, checking scoring leaders … and this was before Jeremy Lin “happened.”

I am perhaps more entertained by the NBA than ever before.

What else, besides that astonishing story in New York, has prompted this?

1. The late start. Opening on Christmas Day is not something the NBA is going to make a habit of, even if in retrospect it is a perfect time to start the season. The league can’t get 82 games into a season that starts on December 25, and the salaries and the rest of the league’s financial constructs are calibrated to a season of that length.

Anyway, jamming 66 games into, what, 124 days has produced a frenetic feel to the league. A sense that something is always happening. That two interesting teams are facing each other every night.

2. The very same bad basketball I described and lamented one month ago …  is growing on me. Not because I like bad basketball, and it most certainly is, but because the weirdness is fun. Which team will struggle to crack 70 tonight? Which superstar will play only 25 minutes because of fatigue or because a score got out of hand early? Which team will win by 20 on Monday and lose by 20 on Tuesday?

This sense of “who knows what the hell will happen?” has gone up by about 100 percent over a typical NBA season. Teams were known to mail in games during an 82-game season, but when they’re playing a game every two nights? Coaches are allowing their players to mail it in.  Encouraging them. Contributing to it by pulling starters on the second night of a back to back.

3.  The sense of “any one of 15 teams could make the NBA Finals.” Miami, Chicago and Oklahoma City have the best records, but are they the best teams? (OK, Miami probably is.) Or just the teams best prepared (deep and/or young) to handle the crazy schedule this season? Don’t you have the feeling that one of the veteran teams mucking around in the fourth, fifth, sixth slots in the playoffs standings could flip a switch when the playoffs come around and they get two weeks to play a seven-game series? On one level, I think the Lakers ought to just relax and miss the playoffs and get a lottery pick to get younger and quicker … but at the same time who says a team with Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum couldn’t have a good month and win a championship? That’s how I feel about a batch of teams. Dallas, Boston, San Antonio, Houston …

4. The Clippers are good and watchable. This never happens. The Clippers are probably going to win their division and have home-court advantage for the first round of the playoffs. But their coach is Vinny Del Negro, whose resume is unimpressive, and their most exciting player (Blake Griffin) is also their most limited and potentially most susceptible to being schemed out of relevance in the playoffs.

5. And now we have Jeremy Lin. The guy emerged from anonymity to make the Knicks relevant. An Asian-American kid from Harvard who twice played in the D-League, who twice was cut, and now he’s taken the Knicks on a seven-game winning streak. This should not be happening.

So, yes, the first thing I do when I get up, here in Abu Dhabi, UAE, is check NBA boxes. Which is what I do during the baseball season — but had never bothered to continue once ball stopped, at the end of September.

It’s this schedule, most of all. All the games cascading towards us, the sense that we have no clear idea of how good anyone really is, the extremes of good and bad … and Jeremy Lin on top of everything else.

And the sense that the weird realities of this season may never exist again. This is worth paying attention to. It’s fun, it’s unpredictable, it’s entertaining.