In a piece published in The Players’ Tribune, 18-year NBA veteran Steve Nash announced his retirement from the NBA months after being ruled out for the season due to a back injury.
But Steve Nash, the encapsulating point guard fans will remember forever, has been gone for some time now. The dastardly, undefeated entity that is Father Time welcomed the long-time Phoenix Sun to Los Angeles with open arms as the point guard we had watched make spectacular pass after spectacular pass in Phoenix and Dallas never show his face in the City of Angels.
(Photo by Stephen Dunn/Getty Images)
Maybe it was leaving behind the mythically great training staff behind in Phoenix that rapidly aged Nash; maybe it was leaving behind an offense that meshed perfectly with his skillset for an offense, and head coach, too, that made Nash look more like Jason Kidd in the late Dallas years and less like himself in his late Phoenix years; maybe the “This is going to be fun” team never had a chance because Dwight and Kobe were never going to get along and Nash’s body was always going to breakdown in Los Angeles because, well, he was 39 years old when the Lakers’ brass, players, fans and analysts all expected him to be the point guard for the remix of the 2005 Los Angeles Laker team.
We’ll never know all the details as to why the Nash-and-Dwight experiment in Los Angeles never worked, injuries aside, but what we will always know now, unfortunately, is that the two-time MVP will never hoist the Larry O’Brien trophy, at least as a player, and that’s a shame.
Sure, a lot of historically great players never win championships, but for somebody like Nash, a point guard who had a ten-plus year stretch of running some of the league’s most efficient offenses, (and by doing so, changing the way some coaches run their offenses now), should have been validated with just one championship, right? Nash was just on the wrong-side of a lot of “what-ifs”.
What if Nash doesn’t leave Dirk, Michael Finley, Mark Cuban and friends in 2005 for Phoenix?
What if Nash never gets hip-checked by Robert Horry in Game 4 of the 2007 Western Conference Finals? Does Phoenix win the series and sweep the Cleveland Cavaliers like Spurs eventually did?
What if Ron Artest never hits the buzzer beater to be the Suns in Game 5 of the 2010 Western Conference Finals? Could that Suns’ team have beaten the 2010 Boston Celtics like the Lakers did in seven games?
The answer to all of these “what-if” questions, unfortunately, is that we’ll never know.
We’ll never know if any of the mentioned instances had gone the other way what Nash’s legacy, and ring count, would look like. But none of that should matter years down the line when I’m watching “Steve Nash’s 10 best assists” videos on YouTube at two-thirty in the morning in the year 2036.
Not every all-time great finds is fortunate enough to play with the right guys, under the right coach, at the right time in their careers to win a championship; just look back at how many great 90s teams didn’t win a championship because Michael Jordan was at his best at the same damn time. We, as fans and writers of the NBA, sometimes lose sight as to how many things have to go a player’s way to win a championship; it’s really, really hard to do.
The “This is going to be fun” Lakers’ team was supposed to be the perfect send-off to Nash’s career; a situation where he no longer had to be the guy and win a ring the way Jason Kidd and Gary Payton had before him. It just didn’t work out the same way it did for Kidd and Payton for Nash and sometimes that happens.
I won’t remember Nash Beard Watch 2014, or the Grantland videos chronicling his return to the floor, who I will remember is the Steve Nash who was the commander of the Seven Seconds or Less offense; a floor general who shot over 40 percent from 3 more seasons than I can remember; a point guard who personified the position every time he would dribble, drive and dish as he drove opposing defenses and coaches mad.
Basically, I’ll remember Steve Nash for being one of the most exciting, interesting basketball players of my lifetime; one of the best, if not the best, Canadian athlete of my lifetime, and the type of player I’ll find myself YouTubing as I frantically search for highlight reels for years and years to come.
That’s a pretty good legacy to have, right?
