Nash still blazing trail
POINT GUARD recruited to fix national team program, put players first
Steve Nash wanted to wait until his NBA career was over, but his old friend Rowan Barrett kept bringing up the names, over and over. Andrew Wiggins. Anthony Bennett. Myck Kabongo. Trey Lyles, maybe. Finally Nash agreed: If the two old friends wanted to have some influence on the golden generation of Canadian basketball, there wasn’t much time.
“Steve clearly wanted to wait,” says Barrett, the assistant general manager of Canada Basketball. “We couldn’t, though.”
“If Steve had waited until his career was over,” adds Mitchell Wiggins, the father of the best young player not in the NCAA, “it would have been too late.”
So Nash agreed and in October 2011, he and Barrett approached Wayne Parrish, the CEO of Canada Basketball (and the chief operating officer of Postmedia). Parrish flew to Phoenix. Nash and Barrett had conditions.
They had played back when, as Nash puts it, “We’d pick the cheapest flight and take four connections to get to a tournament. I remember one that was Toronto-Montreal-New York-Sao PaoloBuenos Aires.”
If they were involved, the program needed a competitive budget to match nations like France, Spain and Argentina. It didn’t have one. Parrish needed to triple the $400,000 budget to do it.
Parrish called businessmen John Bitove and David Cassie — Bitove was a coowner of the expansion Toronto Raptors, once — and they started mining corporate Canada for members of this nation’s basketball tribe; guys like CN chairman David MacLean, who played basketball at the University of Alberta.
Fifty letters were sent out asking for a $20,000 commitment per year for five years. They’d call it the 6th Man Founder’s Club. Nash was put on the phone with some potential donors to explain what he wanted to do. By mid-April 2012, there were more than 20 members, on the way to 25. In May, Nash signed on.
“We need money to fly players around, have coaches, have scouts,” says Nash, who passed Magic Johnson this week to reach No. 4 on the NBA’s all-time career assist leaders. “It’s the bare minimum of what other coun- tries do. This was something we couldn’t do if I didn’t sign on.”
With the money came the plan. The post-Nash generation is a relative volcano of talent.
Wiggins, the 17-year-old from Vaughan, Ont., who is playing in West Virginia, is rated as the No. 1 player in the high school class of 2013. UNLV forward Anthony Bennett is projected by ESPN to be the No. 2 pick in the upcoming NBA draft.
Pointguard Myck Kabongo was just reinstated at Texas after an NCAA suspension
“We have to be a program that really benefits the players.”
STEVE NASH
and is being watched skeptically by the NBA. Power forward Tristan Thompson, the No. 4 pick in 2011, is putting together a strong sophomore season for the Cleveland Cavaliers and big man Andrew Nicholson has seen some time in Orlando.
Gonzaga’s Kelly Olynyk could be an all-American centre and the NCAA is full of Canadians.
Chicago-based 16-year-old big man Trey Lyles, born in Saskatoon, is ranked as the No. 5 recruit in the high school class of 2014.
The pipeline, once thin, is blooming like never before.
“We’re heading to a place when we will have to cut NBA players for the national team,” Parrish says. “And hopefully the bond is so strong they’ll get it.”
Nash believes in the bond that has to be created between the country and its players and the players themselves.
“Look back 10 years or so, when players didn’t feel a need or a want to play for Canada,” Nash says. “I don’t think there’s that tangible tradition for our program. We have to be a program that really benefits the players. We used to say, ‘You have to play for Canada.’ Why? Because it’s your country.
“We have to do better than that.”
Nash never played an NBA player growing up until a Grade 10 trip to Washington. It was a fringe guy, a veteran, and Nash doesn’t even remember his name.
Now players spend their summers searching for the best training, the best competition.
If Canada Basketball brings its NBA-calibre talent together, it will be worth the time of players like Bennett and Wiggins. Last summer, the program brought 20 coaches and 33 players to Toronto for a five-day training camp — Wiggins was the only major player not there — and the bonds were strengthened.
They will have a longer training camp this summer and a major exhibition swing through Europe with a full complement of support staff under coach Jay Triano.
It’s the beginning.
“The reason guys signed up is they believed in Steve’s vision, not just in terms of being able to reach the podium (in 2016 or 2020), but in terms of the legacy he could build for the program,” says Bitove, who says many of the donors prefer to remain anonymous.
Now the program can send Barrett on scouting missions to build relationships with players that didn’t exist before.
Lyles, whose mother is Canadian, wasn’t sure which country he would play for. Barrett travelled to Chicago to meet with him and his family and brought Lyles and his American father to Toronto for three days. Lyles signed on and hit it off with Wiggins on the under-18 team.
So, when Nash came to town with the Lakers in January, Canada Basketball brought together its donors for a dinner and the old point guard spoke about what he saw in store.
When Nash went f rom Vancouver Island to the NBA, it was, at the time, like going to the moon and showing a generation behind you the way there.
Now that path is crowded with young men and he is trying to shepherd them. Our point guard, to the end.
“I don’t necessarily see myself as a road, but (University of Victoria star) Eli Pasquale was a road for me,” Nash says. “There’s a tangible path to follow now. Not just some grey-haired point guard from Victoria.”