There are all kinds of ways to think about Steve Nash. He’s the best Canadian basketball player that has ever lived, and regardless of how big and talented the wave of Canadians crashing the shores of the NBA is, it’s absurd to think that any of them will surpass the skinny white kid from Victoria, B.C.
He’s a sportsman and iconoclast. He’s a budding media mogul and entrepreneur. He’s third all-time in assists, a two-time NBA MVP and a first-ballot hall-of-famer.
He never won a ring but came excruciatingly close and in the process helped usher in a return of up-tempo, ball-movement based basketball.
No ring maybe, but definitely win-win when it comes to basketball aesthetics.
But I prefer to think of him as an astronaut: someone who set course for a place no one – certainly no Canadian – had ever been, made it and survived to inspire those behind.
Even comparing him to an astronaut might be underselling it — there have been eight Canadians who have flown into space, but there has only been one Steve Nash, and by the standards of Canadian basketball he made it well over the moon.
The Los Angeles Lakers announced Thursday that Nash’s chronic nerve and back problems will prevent him from playing this season. It would have been his 19th year in the best basketball league on the planet.
He was the oldest active player in the NBA last season and will be 41 in February, for all intents and purposes his career his over.
An official retirement announcement may have to wait given he wants to collect the $9.3 million he’s owed for the last year of his contract, but that’s the business side of it.
For anyone who really enjoyed basketball and particularly for Canadian basketball fans who loved the game with a little patriotic spice, it’s a sad day.
Steven John Nash won’t play any more. Sure, we have Andrew Wiggins and Tristan Thompson and Nik Stauskas and many others – a legacy of the man himself – but not the original. That’s sad as hell.
Think about it: No more sleight-of-hand bounce passes to a rolling big man who suddenly found a ball in his mitts and a clear path the rim; no more no-look, cross-court, left-handed skip passes to a distant shooter defences left unattended because no one could be reasonably expected to throw a pass like that; no more pausing, probing, seemingly implausible forays through the paint that ended in even more unlikely, wrong-footed, fadeaway bank shots.
More than anything Nash was fun to watch. An original. That he was ours made it a true delight.
I remember talking with Jalen Rose after he had spent a couple of months with Nash with the Phoenix Suns, and even though Rose had played against him for a decade at that point, he was dumbfounded at what it was actually like playing with him.
“This guy will get you 20 points and you don’t even have to dribble,” he said.
The resume is remarkable – eight times an all-star; the leading free throw shooter in NBA history; one of just six players to shoot 50 percent from the floor, 40 percent from three and 90 percent from the line in a single season, and the only player ever to do it four times — but not as amazing as the journey.
Jay Triano was recruiting Nash to come play for him at Simon Fraser University when his was a budding legend on the B.C. high school basketball scene and unknown outside of his own country.
“I felt like I was trapped in an elevator screaming and no one could hear me,” was Nash’s description of what it was like to be unable to gain any scholarship interest in the U.S.
Triano tells the story of sitting with his prized recruit at the Tsawwassen Ferry terminal as he was waiting to make the trip back to Victoria. A storm had come up so the ferry was delayed. There was time to kill.
Nash told Triano that one school, Santa Clara University, was interested in him – he’d only got on their radar after an assistant coach of another school had seen Nash in some exhibition games with the junior National team (from which Nash would eventually get cut) and put the San Francisco school on his trail – “What would you do?” Nash asked.
Triano told him he should go for it. Follow his dreams.
It may have cost him the best recruit of his career, but his selfless advice gained Triano a friend for life.
It wasn’t a straight shot. He was the No. 15 pick in the loaded 1996 NBA draft who sat on the bench as a rookie in Phoenix and a highly-paid free agent who got booed at home in Dallas. He didn’t win his first MVP award until he was 30.
But Nash kept growing his game and tinkering with his body, all the while never losing sight that if he could make his teammates lives better in every sense, the team would benefit. They were lessons he honed playing internationally for Canada and so it was fitting that Triano was one of the first people to hear that his old friend had played his last game.
Triano thought he would see Nash Wednesday night when the Portland Trail Blazers – where Triano is an assistant coach – were playing an exhibition game against the Los Angeles Lakers.
“He wasn’t at the game so I texted him this morning (Thursday) to see how he was doing and he told me that he was done, that he was going to announce he was going to miss the season,” said Triano.
The pair’s history is inextricably intertwined. They shared what each of them call their peak moment in basketball when Nash led the Triano-coached Canadian National team to a 5-2 record and a heart-wrenching loss to France in the quarterfinals in Sydney in 2000.
But Triano said it wasn’t sad for him to learn his friend was finally finished. He remains in awe of what he accomplished.
“I sent him a message and just told him to be proud of what he did, that it wasn’t a sad day, but a day to reflect the career he had,” said Triano. “He should be proud of what he’s done.”
Like any basketball fan, Triano has a long list of memories provided by Nash, but his favourite was coaching him with the National team in Sydney, where Nash bawled like a baby after he failed to get Canada past France and earn a chance to play for an Olympic medal, something that has eluded Canada since 1936.
“To see what playing for his country meant to him and to see how he demanded to be treated just like one of the guys even though he was already an established NBA player was amazing to me,” said Triano. “And then to see him go from there and really see his career take off, you just knew he was a special a person as he was an athlete.”
There is no surprise in the announcement that Nash won’t play this season and likely ever again. The end was coming, but Nash had done the impossible before, so you never wanted to completely shut the door on him.
Now that he’s made his decision, Triano is right: It’s time to celebrate an athletic arc that will never be repeated.
Nash the astronaut is grounded for good, but never forget: he set course for the stars, and goddamn it, he made it.