- Steve Nash
Resume: 14 years, 10 quality, 7 All-Stars…MVP: ’05, ’06…’07 MVP runner-up…Bill Simmons MVP(’07)…top 5(’05, ’06, ’07), Top 10(’08,’10), top 15(’02, ‘3)…leader: assists(4x), FT%(2x)…4-year peak: 17-11-4, 51% FG, 45% 3FG, 90% FT…3-year Playoffs peak: 21-11-4, 49%FG, 40%3FG, 90%FT(46 Games)…career: 90.3%FT(2nd overall), 43.1% 3FG(5th overall), 9,353 assists(6th overall), 8.5 APG(7th overall)
The case for Nash cracking the top-40 of all time: won back-to-back MVPs, a sentence that looks so unbelievable in print, my eyeballs just popped out of my head Allan Ray-style (only Bird, Magic, MJ, Russell, Wilt, Duncan, Moses, Kareem and Nash did it)…along with Bird and Nowitzki, one of the three 50/40/90 Club members to make an All-NBA team(and he did it twice)[10] …exceptionally fun to watch on the offensive end…willed himself into becoming a Stockton-like crunch-time assassin…you could call him the Evolutionary Cousy(or, Cousy with a jumpshot)…helped bring back three dying art forms: passing, fast breaks and crappy hair…five-time winner of the Guy Everyone in the League Would Have Killed to Play With Award(’05, ’06, ’07, ’08, ’10)…replaced Wayne Gretzky as Canada’s most popular athlete after the Janet Jones gambling scandal…improved the careers of Shawn Marion and Amar’e Stoudemire by at least 35 percent…the only player this decade who inspired Tim Thomas to give a shit[11]…drew a handful of “that’s one bad-ass white boy” compliments from Charles Barkley over the past few years…probably would have starred in a Finals if (a)Phoenix’s owner wasn’t such a cheapskate, (b)Joe Johnson didn’t break his face early in the ’05 playoffs, (c)Tim Donaghy reffing Game 3 and the Amar’e/Diaw leaving-the-bench suspensions[12] never happened in ’07, (d)Tim Duncan didn’t hit that crazy three in Game 1 of the ’08 Spurs series, and/or (e)Jason Richardson had boxed out Ron Artest in Game 5 of the ’10 Lakers series…the more Nash plays with his teammates, the better he gets(like Gretzky during his Edmonton days)…and he’s the one modern NBA superstar who lived up to the words “franchise player” through thick and thin.
(When Nash re-signed for three more years in 2009, I remember thinking, “Why the hell would he stay in Phoenix?” In America, we’re accustomed to superstars who find themselves stuck on a sinking ship, then bolt for greener pastures or selfishly demand a trade without considering the ramifications of that request. Once you say, “You guys aren’t good enough to play with me, I need a better team,” the situation becomes irreparable. Nash always understood that. He’s Canadian. He’s loyal. He’s the leader. Franchise players are supposed to lead. So he stayed knowing that his Finals window had probably closed. Now here’s why you have to love sports: in his finest season given his age, Nash banged out a 17-11 with 51-43-94 percentages—unprecented numbers for a thirty-six-year-old point guard—while brewing the league’s best chemistry, performing open-heart surgery on Amar’e Stoudemire[who reinvented himself to the degree that New York stupidly gave him $100 million], leading unproven youngsters like Jared Dudley, Robin Lopez and Goran Dragic,[P43] finally beating San Antonio in a series[and sobbing in the locker room afterwards], and somehow dragging a fringe playoff team within two wins of the 2010 Finals[P44]. Now we’re looking at a career. Ten straight elite years, nine 50-win teams, two MVPs, seven All-Stars, multiple All-NBAs, the best shooting percentages in NBA history, and pole position for the “guard everyone in his generation would have loved playing with most” contest over Kidd. That’s why I moved him from Level 4 to Level 3 for the paperback.)
The case against Nash cracking the top forty: Struggled with a bad back during his first four seasons, missing 64 games in all(and rendering the first third of his career moot)…an ineffective defensive player who doesn’t get steals and can’t be hidden against elite point guards…looks like a cross between Jackie Earle Haley and James Blunt…the validity of his consecutive MVP trophies can be picked apart, although he should have won in ’07…of all players who benefited from the rule changes before the ’05 season, Nash was number one on the list…creamed offensively in the playoffs by Mike Bibby(’02, ’04) and Tony Parker(’07, ’08), a huge reason for his team’s exits in those years…you have to wonder about the top-forty credentials of anyone who was offered a perfectly reasonable six-year, $60 million free agent offer by Phoenix in his prime, asked Mark Cuban to match that offer and had Cuba basically say to him, “Sorry, that’s a little rich for my blood; we’d rather spend that money on Erick Dampier.” I mean, when Cuban wonders about the fiscal sanity of a contract, THAT is saying something.
So why stick Nash this high? For three reasons that went beyond everything we just mentioned. First, he played for a series of all-offense/no-defense teams in Dallas and Phoenix and never landed on a quality defensive team that protected him the way the Lakers protected Magic. His deficiencies were constantly exposed on that end, so we were always thinking about them. That’s not totally fair. If you think Nash sucked on defense, you should have seen Magic pretending to be a bullfighter in the late eighties and early nineties. Ole! Ole! But Magic’s teammates could protect him. When Nash’s opponents beat him off the dribble, they scored because he never had smart team defenders or a shot blocker behind him. It’s like Kate Hudson’s performance in Almost Famous—she’s a semi-abysmal actress, but give her a fantastic script and a great part and suddenly she’s getting an Oscar nomination. Had Nash switched places with Tony Parker(another lousy defender) for the past four years and gotten protected by Popovich and Duncan, we wouldn’t have complained about his defense as much. It’s all about situations.
Second, former teammate Paul Shirley argued Nash’s MVP credentials with me once by emailing me an excellent point about how valuable Nash really was to Phoenix, saying that Nash’s style was contagious to the rest of the Suns as soon as he showed up from Dallas. Within a few weeks, everyone started playing unselfishly and getting each other baskets, like his magnanimity had seeped into everyone else by osmosis…and when you think about it, that’s the single most important way you can affect a basketball team. In my lifetime, only Bird, Magic, Kidd and Walton affected their teams to that same degree. And Isiah Rider, if this were Bizarro World.
Third, Nash’s magnificent performance during the ’07 season—ironically, the season when he didn’t win the MVP—pushed him up a level for me. He never had a killer instinct until that year; even when he dropped 48 in an ’05 playoff game because the Mavs were blanketing his teammates and daring Nash to score, he seemed sheepish about it afterward. But falling short in ’05 and ’06 hardening him; maybe he didn’t go to the dark side like Danny LaRusso during the Terry Silver era, but he developed a nasty edge that nobody remembered seeing before. My guess: Nash spent the summer mulling over his career and everything that had happened, ultimately realizing that he couldn’t do anything more other than win his first title. Then he thought long and hard about how to do it, ultimately cutting off his hair(feel the symbolism, baby!) and getting in superb shape so he wouldn’t wear down in the playoffs again. When he showed up for training camp and realized the Marion-Stoudemire soap opera would be an ongoing problem[13] , Boris Diaw was out of shape, and new free agent Marcus Banks couldn’t help, something snapped inside him. Exit, nice Steve Nash. Enter, icy Steve Nash. Suddenly he was tripping guys on picks, barking at officials and getting testy with his own teammates, eventually righting the ship and leading the Suns to the highest level of offensive basketball we’ve witnessed in twenty years. Really, it was a virtuoso season for him as an offensive player and a leader; borrowing the same tactic that once worked so well for Magic, Isiah and Stockton, Nash used the first 40 minutes to get everyone else going, then took over in crunch time if the Suns needed it. Sometimes he’d even unleash the “Look, there’s no way we’re effing losing this game!” glare on his face, an absolute staple for any MVP candidate.
Somewhere along the line, he won me over. Once one of the harsher critics of the voting for his back-to-back MVPs, I ended up writing the following about Nash during the ’07 playoffs: “Regardless of what happens in San Antonio ,I love what happened to Nash this season; his competitive spirit, toughness and leadership reminds me of Bird, Magic, MJ and Isiah back in the day. That’s the highest praise I can give. At the very least, you know the Suns won’t get blown out—they’ll be in the game and fighting until the very end. You can count on that from them. He’s the reason.”
You could go to war with Steve Nash, and really, that’s all that matters.
Footnotes:
[10]The 50-40-90 Club covers anyone who topped 50% FG, 40% 3FG and 90%FT shooting in one season. Not easy. Five players belong to the club: Larry Bird, Reggie Miller, Mark Price, Dirk Nowitzki, and Steve Nash. Nash has hit these astronomical percentages four times(and missed a fifth by .001%); the next highest count belongs to Bird with two.
[11]No small feat. Here’s how I described Tim Thomas in 2008: “Is there an NBA forward alive who couldn’t average 31 minutes, 12 points, five rebounds and three assists, miss 70 percent of his 3-pointers and allow his guy to score at will? If baseball has VORP(value over replacement player), then basketball should have VOTT(value over Tim Thomas). He’s such a dog that PETA might protest this paragraph.” Ten months later, Basketball Prospectus unveiled a WARP stat that reveale Thomas scored exactly at replacement level for the ’08 and ’09 seasons. Stu Scott, give me a boo yeah!
[12]We can’t use seatbelts, and we can’t put a rope around the bench because a player could go flying into the rope during play and get practically decapitated…but what about an electric-fence-type device where they’d get shocked if they ventured onto the court, like what people use with their dogs in the backyard? Wouldn’t that be worth it just to see Eddy Curry zone out, stand up to stretch and accidentally electroshock himself?
[P43] We invited Nash and Dudley to an ESPN dinner at the 2010 Sundance Festival. Nash said there were three reasons he wasn’t aging: a no-sugar diet, a sleep journal and a steady supply of undetectable PEDs.(Fine, I made the last one up.) He said the no-sugar diet made him recover faster after games; half the 2010 followed suit and cut their sugar intake, including Dudley, who lost 20 pounds and became an elite bench player. I wouldn’t have believed it until we watched Jared read his menu aloud and ask Nash, “Can I have this? What about this?” not only does Nash make his teammates better, he orders for them!
[P44]Nash added to an unfortunate record that spring: 118 career postseason games without making an NBA Finals. Nobody else is in triple digits.
[13]They had an alpha dog battle that revolved around important stuff like “why did he get the best seat on the charter last night?” and “Why is his locker in a better spot than mine?” Also, they fought over a chew toy once. Whoops, I’m thinking of my dog. Sorry.
Simmons, Bill. "Steve Nash." The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy. New York: Ballantine/ESPN, 2009. 428-32. Print
Submitted March 21, 2015 at 03:50PM by Nicheslovespecies http://ift.tt/1xoqU8P
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