HOUSTON — The schedule says it all. The Houston Rockets, coming off a 34-32 season but with Jeremy Lin now a member of the team, have a nationally televised Christmas-night game in Chicago this season. Anyone wonder why?

“We wouldn’t be getting a Christmas game if it wasn’t for Jeremy Lin,” guard Shaun Livingston said as the Rockets held media day on Monday to open their training camp. Livingston is right. Aside from Lin, the 2012-13 Rockets’ roster is rather bland as well as young. Eleven of the 20 players are rookies or second-year players. In that sense, the 24-year-old Lin, a 6-foot-3-inch point guard with all of 64 games of N.B.A. experience, fits right in. And his teammates seemed to enjoy talking, and joking, about him.

“I can’t wait until I’m watching ESPN and I see a highlight of Jeremy Lin passing me the ball and I hit a shot and they say, ‘Jeremy Lin to Jeremy Lamb,’ ” said Lamb, a rookie out of Connecticut. “Or the other way around when I pass it to him, because he’s a great shooter.”

In 35 games (25 starts) with the Knicks last season, Lin averaged 14.6 points and 6.2 assists a game. More than that, he became a national phenomenon, the Lin in Linsanity, which, in the end, did not last all that long because, over the summer, the Knicks did not match the Rockets’ free-agent contract offer.