Hall-of-Famer Nash ‘changed the game’
TORONTO — On Friday, Steve Nash will enter the Hall of Fame as one of the greatest shooters and passers who has ever lived, as one of the greatest point guards ever, as one of 13 players with more than a single National Basketball Association MVP award. He changed the way the game was played, to the point that the winners of four of the last five MVPs have cited him as an influence.
Steph Curry, one of those multiple winners, once told Sports Illustrated: “He created a new way to play. He inspired me to play the way I was comfortable.”
And, before all that, he was one of a crop of a bunch of high school kids who might be something, even something special. There was only one Steve Nash, but maybe there could have been another.
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In his senior year of high school, Nash was the best player in the province on the best team, but college coaches considered it a high school class unusually rich in talent, in a secretly fertile environment. As former national team coach Ken Shields put it, there were as many players for Team Canada from B.C. at the time as there were from Ontario.
And there was Nash. It’s hard to explain how far he came, how different the world was technologically, culturally. How playing basketball in Victoria in 1992 was like belonging, in the bigger basketball world, to an undiscovered tribe.
“Back then, if you were noticed, someone saw you, word travelled, and people would have to come and see you,” says Scott Walton, star of the Pitt Meadows team that lost to Nash’s St. Michaels University in the provincial final. “Now, you send a link to someone and they’re watching you on the other side of the continent. In that era, you had to really earn it. You didn’t get any breaks.”
“You’re in Victoria, you might as well be on the other side of the world from the United States, at that time,” said Pat Cannon, a star six-foot-eight post player at Nash’s Island rival, Alberni.
Nash, though, was an early legend. Other high-end players started hearing about him in Grade 9. Players who saw him describe a cerebral player who wasn’t afraid of turnovers, but never seemed to commit them; who would put you off balance, then wrong-foot you again; who didn’t shoot much, but would kill you when he did.
There was hidden stuff, too. Vancouver College forward Paul Williscroft, an athletic six-footseven wing who could play anywhere on the floor, says in Grade 11 Nash could stand under the hoops and dunk a ball, no steps, two hands, reverse. Williscroft couldn’t do it. Players who hung out with Nash said he was the most confident kid they’d ever seen. He would run across the street to talk to a girl while his buddies stayed frozen, rooted to the spot.
And people knew about Nash, but he wasn’t the only kid with potential out there. Nanaimo, B.C., had a ferocious point guard named Gary Edgar, of the Nuxalk tribe in Bella Coola, who could just about hang with Nash. Walton and Cannon thought Williscroft — who like Nash, came from an athletic family — was the most talented guy in the province.
“Well, talent doesn’t always equate, does it?” says Williscroft, who played commendably at a local college, semi-pro in Denmark and for Team Canada from 1996 to ’98, and is now an account manager for a B.C.-based construction company. “It’ll get you so far as a 6-5 white guy in a white province but, when you get up to the next level, there’s a lot of people that are just as talented as you. And do you have the tools to figure out how to get better than those people?
“It took someone like him to shock the world.”
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There was only one Nash. Walton played at a junior college, and his grades were a mess until he was diagnosed with dyslexia in his early 20s; he played at Brandon University as a mature student in 2001, lost in the national final, then got two degrees and became a teacher. He’s been coaching high school basketball for 17 years. Cannon played five years at the University of Victoria, winning a Canadian university title, and is also a teacher. Edgar played for Malaspina College, played in First Nations tournaments, and now is a crane operator in the Vancouver area with two kids, the elder of whom can really play. Other local stars played at UBC or UVic or SFU, then coached by Jay Triano. (SFU had hoped to get Nash, and still had six freshmen from his high school class on their 1992-93 team.)
“Some people are OK with the SFU or UBC, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” says Walton, who coaches in Prince George, B.C. “You have to be cut from a certain cloth to want more.
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They were all good, the best of their generation. But there have always been local legends in basketball gyms across the country, and the numbers and level increases every year. Canada has more NBA players than it has roster spots on the national team, now. We’re arriving.
And there was still one Steve Nash, just one. He needed it all: the competition, the guidance, the athleticism, the fearlessness, the chance.
He needed the limitless appetite for improvement, the basketball IQ that expanded throughout his adult life. Shields once watched Nash play up as a Grade 11 against national team players and told the man next to him: “He’s going to play in the NBA.” But nobody saw what was really coming, because it was the product of lands that couldn’t be discovered, until they were.
“It’s staggering,” says Shields, who watched and helped all along the way.
“Absolutely staggering. He actually changed the game.”