Jeremy Lin is a master of style

April 30 is National Hairstylist Appreciation Day, and Jeremy Lin probably has it circled on his calendar.

This has been a year of rediscovery for Lin. After wandering in the desert of Los Angeles Lakers basketball for a season, Lin has reestablished himself as a key contributor on a playoff team, lifting the Charlotte Hornets to 48 wins. Playing primarily off the bench, Lin’s aggressive dribble penetration has been an important tool for the Hornets, buoying their second-unit offense and helping push the Miami Heat to the brink of elimination in their first round-playoff series.

As Lin has been solidifying and redefining his basketball niche this season, he has also been expanding his stylistic niche in new and creative directions. The regular season began with Lin sporting a carefully sculpted mohawk. Jagged, with just the right amount of sharp edges, this hairstyle seemed to reflect a new Lin. One who was, perhaps, finally comfortable enough with his place in the NBA to begin pushing back at the box fans and media had placed him in.

It was just the beginning of his follicular evolution. This season Lin has played with five distinct hairstyles: The Mohawk, The Brushback, The Sidepart, The Headband, and now, in the playoffs, The Ponytail.

At the risk of reading too much into decisions of pure style, each of these hairstyles seems to serve a different aesthetic purpose, reflecting different aspects of his basketball personality. Watching how his hair has changed over the course of the season offers insights into the type of player he’s become. Or, if that’s too big a reach, it at least lets us marvel at the artistic possibilities for the human head.

The Mohawk was how Lin began the season and he wore it for 20 consecutive games through the beginning of December. The boldest of his five hairstyles, The Mohawk also appeared to be making the strongest statement. In mid-September, when Lin visited the arena in Charlotte for the first time, he was stopped by security who didn’t recognize him. One would assume that an eight-inch tall mohawk would eliminate any further issues of mistaken identity.

From the first week in December on, Lin only sported The Mohawk for seven more games, scattered over the next two months. He has not worn it in a game since January 16. By that point, it had served its purpose.

The Brushback was the first alternative to The Mohawk that we saw from Lin this season. It first appeared in early December marking a period of night-to-night experimentation that would last for several weeks. Lin actually wore The Brushback style more than any other this season, 40 games altogether, including an uninterrupted two-month stretch from the beginning of February to the beginning of April.

The Brushback is a far more stylistically subtle choice than The Mohawk and one would imagine it requires far less preparation time. It also arrived at the end of a 10-4 stretch for the Charlotte Hornets, a period where the team’s identity was coalescing and Lin’s role within the team was becoming increasingly defined and secure. The physics of each style are too complex to fully deconstruct here, but this is also likely the most aerodynamic of Lin’s styles, a small competitive advantage over The Mohawk.

The Sidepart is a geometric twist on The Brushback, a bit of flair woven into a more staid hairstyle choice. Lin wore it in a game for the first time on December 19, during that end-of-the-year experimentation period. He went back to it for six consecutive games at the end of January and beginning of February, leading directly into the two-month run for The Brushback.

Worn only eight times all season, The Sidepart seemed to function almost as an alter ego. A chance for Lin to try on a different persona, still fairly conservative but with an understated flair. He played that way with this hairstyle, controlled but pushing himself as well. Whatever physical or psychological need this style served appears to have been excised fairly quickly and it has not appeared since the end of February.

Some days you just don’t feel like getting out of bed. You certainly don’t feel like taking the time to work with combs and gels and sculpting chutneys. Just slap a headband on that mop, go do your job, get home and get back under the covers. The Headband was worn just twice this season, thank goodness. I think we’d all like to forget it as quickly as possible.

The Ponytail is Lin’s newest hairstyle and it has become his go-to for Charlotte’s playoff run. He experimented with it only once during the regular season, on April 8, just a few days before the playoffs began. While this postseason is not the best stretch of basketball Lin has played in his career — it will be hard to ever top that initial run of Linsanity with the New York Knicks — this is certainly the most meaningful. If The Ponytail is at all representative of style of play, it is a stand in for a mindset of relentless attack. His confident drives to the basket have helped unravel Miami’s defense and been perhaps Charlotte’s most reliable offensive weapon in the series.

Parsing Lin’s production by hairstyle this season reveals some clear differences. The table below shows some of his shooting percentages and per 36 minute levels of production with each style. DRE is a box-score based measure from Nylon Calculus that estimates a player’s overall impact per 100 possessions.

In terms of production, The Ponytail may not be Lin’s most best style. DRE estimates that he was most effective when sporting The Mohawk this season and his raw numbers with The Sidepart are intriguing as well. However, Lin with The Ponytail seems to be the best overlap between form and function — the way he has played in the playoffs has been as essential as oxygen and electrolytes to his team’s success.

Earlier in the season, Lin even hinted that this was where he was heading. When Lin gave this interview, he was in the middle of his experimentation period and, given the mention of Spencer Hawes, it seems more than possible that The Ponytail has been the endgame all along.

Maybe, like a playoff beard in hockey, The Ponytail is here to stay until the Charlotte Hornets are eliminated from the postseason. Or, perhaps, a difficult game or two could send Lin running back to one of these other tried and true hairstyles (no more headband, please!) in search of the solid footing he’s been playing on all season. It could also be that there is still an untapped well of creativity deep within him, that The Ponytail is just an intermediate step on the way to some new and glorious hairstyle to be unveiled later in the playoffs or next season.

Whatever comes next for Jeremy Lin’s head, it’s been a wonderful ride.

Thanks to Daniel Rowell for the illustrations in this article. Follow him on Twitter @DanielJRowell.