NASH NOMINATED FOR HALL
One step left for Victoria’s NBA great
Steve Nash is now on the doorstep of basketball immortality.
The Victoria-raised former NBA star is on the list of nominees for 2018 enshrinement in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Nash, 43, rose to local prominence as star point guard in high school for St. Michael’s University School in Victoria. He then played four years of collegiate ball for the University of California at Santa Clara, before spending 18 years in the NBA with the Phoenix Suns, the Dallas Mavericks and the Los Angeles Lakers.
The two-time NBA MVP is 82nd all time in scoring and holds the best free-throw percentage in league history. He’s well-noted for bringing an uptempo style to the point guard position. He was at the helm of the league’s best offence for nine consecutive years.
He was also known for finding an empty court to shoot at, no matter what city he was in.
His former high school coach figures Nash changed the game.
“The NBA is flying as a league,” Ian Hyde-Lay said Thursday over the phone from Victoria, where he’s still coaching basketball and rugby at SMUS.
“Many of the teams now are playing the way Phoenix played (when Nash was there).”
Under coach Mike D’Antoni, Nash led a Phoenix offence that pushed the tempo, spread out offences, emphasized the pick and roll and saw the power of the threepoint shot.
Steph Curry said he patterned his game after Nash. So did Chris Paul.
At Santa Clara — the lone NCAA school to offer him a scholarship — Nash was known to walk around campus dribbling a tennis ball.
“His work ethic and his determination,” are what Hyde-Lay brings up when asked what he thinks about Nash as a teenager. “He was a great leader, even back then.”
Now, 25 years after he last coached Nash, Hyde-Lay said he’s not overly surprised to see how far he’s gone.
“In high school you appreciated that he was exceptionally good,” he said. “I was never surprised to see him achieve at the next level.”
Hyde-Lay sent letters and clips of Nash’s play to 30 schools, but only Santa Clara’s Dick Davey took note. The coach came to Victoria to watch Nash and was instantly impressed.
“After seeing him I was nervous as hell just hoping that no one else would see him,” Davey told Fastbreak Magazine in 1996. “It didn’t take a Nobel Prize winner to figure out this guy’s pretty good. It was just a case of hoping that none of the big names came around.”
Nash played for four years in Santa Clara (1992 to 1996) before being drafted by the Suns. He didn’t play much his first two seasons in the desert. He was traded to Dallas in 1998, where he finally got a chance to play and started emerging as the superstar we now remember him as.
A return to Phoenix in 2004 took him into the stratosphere. He was named the league’s MVP in 2005 and repeated in 2006.
Even before back problems forced him to retire in 2014, early in his third season with the Lakers, he was general manager of Canada’s national basketball squad.
He led the team to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, but hasn’t played for the team since 2004 after he disagreed with the decision to fire then-coach Jay Triano.
Shortly after being hired as Canada Basketball’s GM in 2012, he rehired Triano as coach.
Always known for his willingness to speak out on what he thought was right, Nash protested against the 2003 invasion of Iraq and more recently has criticized U.S. President Donald Trump. In 2006, Time magazine named him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
He’s long been considered a candidate for the title of greatest Canadian athlete. A passionate soccer player and fan, he owns stakes in the Vancouver Whitecaps FC and in Spanish club RCD Mallorca.
On Twitter, Nash said he was honoured to be nominated and then paid tribute to his family, coaches, teammates and supporters.
The list of NBA players to have won back-to-back MVPs is not long: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Moses Malone, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Tim Duncan, LeBron James, Stephen Curry — and Steve Nash. That’s elite company.
The Basketball Hall of Fame’s committee will consider dozens of names. In mid-February, at NBA All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles, the 2018 finalists will be announced. Then at the NCAA Final Four in early April in San Antonio, the players who will make up the 2018 class will be announced.
Don’t be surprised if Nash gets in.