Nash easy to find if you’re looking
The game he pioneered in Phoenix has spread across the basketball world
Steve Nash couldn’t watch every game — life got in the way, as it does — but oh, he wanted to. He wanted to see every part of the Golden State Warriors versus LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA final. It was, in a way, a little personal. “You can tell by watching: this just feels right,” the 41-year-old Nash said in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “The ball’s moving, the game is flowing, you see the beauty, you see the decision-making, you see things open up, you see the ease versus the tension. Like, look at Cleveland. LeBron’s brilliant. Without (Andre) Iguodala, he would have scored 50 a game. Iguodala was good enough to hold him to 40 a game. You know?
“But poor LeBron — ha, poor Lebron, don’t get me wrong — but it was tension, tension, tension, where for Golden State it was a bit of tension and then it was fluidity and movement and no tension, and that’s the difference in so many ways. And you see that with San Antonio, too. It gives the defence a chance to self-destruct, and it’s how the game should be played. And it’s kind of obvious.”
Golden State won partly because Cleveland was hurt by injury, and lacking in depth. The Warriors were the top-ranked defensive team in basketball. But the Warriors were top-three in defence the year before, too, and were the 12th-ranked offensive team last season under then-coach Mark Jackson.
They became the No. 1-ranked offensive team in the NBA this year under Steve Kerr, who emphasized passing, spacing and shooting, and brought in former Suns assistant and head coach Alvin Gentry as his lead assistant.
And as recorded by Ethan Strauss, in the moments after the Warriors won the championship, Gentry yelled out, “Tell Mike D’Antoni he’s vindicated! We just kicked everyone’s ass playing the way everybody complained about!”
In other words, the revolution that Nash started in Phoenix — echoing previous attempts by Don Nelson with the Warriors in the 1990s — came full circle a week ago in Cleveland.
“We were a little early,” said Nash, who retired this year after an injuryplagued last three years with the Lakers. “I mean, maybe if we would have got a few more bounces we would have won and we would have broken through that barrier, but that train of thought broke over the last 10 years, and I mean, I think the vindication for Mike is that this series ended up being a small-ball series for the meat of it.” Those Suns were a fond memory for most, but were derided and dismissed, too. When Nash’s Phoenix teams were put together by then-GM Bryan Colangelo in 2004, they were a revolution. Under head coach Mike D’Antoni, they played fast, played small, spaced the floor, and led the league in offensive efficiency from 2005 to 2010. They were awesome. They didn’t win a title. And the game’s traditionalists said, I told you so.
“Yeah, I mean, you just take a beating every day,” Nash said. “‘You can’t win this way, you can’t win this way,’ you know. And Mike’s whole thing was ‘Yes you can, yes you can.’
“But eventually you go, oh man, this is no fun, getting beat over the head. And then you creep back to the middle, and you’re giving an inch, and it’s tough. But that’s what it’s like for all people who kind of get out ahead of the curve.”
Kerr was Phoenix’s general manager from 2007 to 2010. He helped to push D’Antoni out, and traded for Shaquille O’Neal. But he tried to trade Amar’e Stoudemire for Curry before the draft, too. People said a jump-shooting team couldn’t win a title. Kerr came to disagree.
“I imagined it with Steve Nash. Steve was kind of the original Stephen Curry,” Kerr told reporters the night the Warriors won the title. “And the Suns were so close. Things didn’t go their way. But I imagined it. And I was there with Steve as general manager, and I thought it was going to happen for him. But he set the stage for Steph.
“I think Steve kind of laid out a vision for a whole generation of young point guards. And with the game changing, Mike D’Antoni kind of initiating that style in Phoenix, the floor starting to spread, the whole league kind of playing shooting fours and fives and playing a little faster . . . I think Mike and Steve in many ways set the table for Steph Curry. And I think Steph would tell you that, too. He has great respect for Steve.”
Gentry showed Curry tape of Nash before the season began, to try to show him how to see the pass beyond the pass, the chess game. The Warriors used some Suns sets. Nash, meanwhile, lists Curry as one of his three favourite NBA players to watch, along with Oklahoma City’s Kevin Durant and Cleveland’s Kyrie Irving. Of those, Curry is the closest to what Nash was, and is getting closer.
“I don’t want to come across as Steph Curry has this to improve on, because he’s really good, you know?” Nash said. “Invention is borne out of necessity. So for me, my DNA set me up to invent through passing. That was my way in. I was always like that, in soccer, hockey, basketball — I was always thinking one-two-three, space and angles and time and weight of pass, all sorts of things. Where Steph, while he’s a beautiful passer, he came at this from an otherworldly confident technique of shooting.
“So I think that’s a part of who we are — perhaps because I manipulated defences, and came at it that way, and evolved, and took that to a really high place for me, I didn’t have to maybe take some of the shots that Steph takes. On the other hand, Steph doesn’t have to manipulate so many defences when he can get a guy off balance and just jack from 25 feet.
“He’s getting closer to where I was, in that he’s going to evolve more into that manipulating defences and thinking one or two plays ahead, because he was an undersized two for a large part of his life. Yeah, he has a gift for passing the ball. He has the hands, and he has ideas and creativity. But I don’t think it’s natural for him yet. He’s made a very difficult transition from kind of being a two to being the MVP of the NBA at the one. That’s not easy to do.
“What Alvin’s trying to get across to him is that playing that chess game will make it easier. He’ll have to exert himself less.”
Nash had to learn to score. In high school, his St. Michael’s team was only up two points at the half of the provincial championship game, fought in their locker room, and Nash went one-on-one a lot in the second half. Invention, and necessity. He notes Curry fought through physicality from Memphis and Cleveland, and he adapted.
Nash isn’t a sentimental man, but he notes that Phoenix had other problems — they didn’t have Golden State’s defenders, or their depth. Under skinflint owner Robert Sarver, the Suns sold off draft picks that could have become Iguodala or Luol Deng, or Rajon Rondo, or Rudy Fernandez, or . . . the list goes on. They didn’t have the bodies when it mattered. And the bad luck — Joe Johnson breaking his face, Stoudemire’s knees, Nash’s bloody nose game, the suspensions of 2007 — meant the window was small.
And to some, that meant the style couldn’t win. Except Nash sees it everywhere, now. The Spurs won the title last year with beautiful motion-based basketball, with passing. Golden State is built that way, too. Spacing the floor, going away from big men, three-pointers, pace — they’re all threaded throughout a new, more beautiful NBA, now. And this wave started with Colangelo,
“We were a little early. I mean, maybe if we would have got a few more bounces we would have won.” STEVE NASH
D’Antoni, and Nash.
“It was different, and people wanted to crucify him for it,” Nash said. “We weren’t good defensively, and that goes against everything that basketball is, but we didn’t have much of a choice. We didn’t necessarily have the size or personnel to go back the other way.”
But the style — Nash is a laid-back guy, but he can still get excited about basketball, and doing it right. He talks faster when he talks about how Gregg Popovich moved away from Tim Duncan in the post, or about how his old buddy Barbosa became a ball-mover, or about how fun basketball is the best basketball. He misses it. How could he not?
It’s getting better, though — the nerve problems that plagued him have calmed down, and he’s starting to get over the end, now. Steve Nash doesn’t play anymore, and in a way, he doesn’t have to. You can still see him out there, if you look.