You’ve probably heard it by now. On Saturday, Los Angeles Lakers guard Steve Nash announced his retirement.
When I first heard the news, I kind of shrugged my shoulders. I mean, Nash has virtually been retired since the beginning of the season. Since being acquired by the Lakers in 2012, he's appeared in just 65 regular season games.
It’s sad how things ended for Nash, but that’s not what we should be focusing on at all.
Nash had one of the best careers that we’ve seen from any basketball player without ever being considered the game’s best player at any given time. Sure, he won back-to-back MVPs, but that’s different than being the best. That’s probably something we’ll see this season when LeBron James doesn’t win the MVP.
If you were a point guard growing up anytime from 2004 to 2010, Nash was your favorite player. He made Phoenix relevant and played basketball in a way that was just cool. He could pass. Man, could he pass, but he could also shoot. In 2006-07 he shot 53.2 percent from the field, 45.5 percent from the three-point line and 89.9 from the free-throw line. If he was strictly a shooter or passer, that would be one thing, but Nash was great at both of them.
He made basketball incredibly fun to watch and made every young kid consider playing more like Nash than playing like Kobe Bryant.
(Which is a good thing. The NBA has room for one or two players like Kobe. Every team could use a Nash.)
“My favorite player growing up, one of them, was Steve Nash,” Wolves guard Ricky Rubio said. “I loved what he did, how he controlled the tempo of the game with not just scoring, but passing the ball and leading his team… I saw him when he was playing in Phoenix with (Amar'e) Stoudemire and that combo (was) so great to see. Playing against him was a dream come true.”
Nash and Stoudemire, along with head coach Mark D’Antoni, are probably the most famous and historical team in recent memory to never win an NBA title. Nash wasn’t a great defender, but he didn’t need to be. Not in D’Antoni’s offense. D'Antoni recently said that he and Nash "pushed the envelope" when it came to running an NBA offense, and that's 100 percent accurate.
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The closest Nash got to the NBA Finals was in 2006 when the Suns lost in six games to the Dallas Mavericks. And that’s so sad considering how incredibly unselfish Nash was as a player. If anyone deserved to win a ring, it was this guy. A player who was never considered a worthy star in the league until he was 30 years old in his first season returning with the Suns.
He was drafted 15th in the 1996 Draft, which is silly to think about now. He was picked after guys like Kerry Kittles, Samaki Walker, Todd Fuller and Vitaly Potapenko.
The Wolves traded for Stephon Marbuy in that draft, but if that move hadn’t occurred, there’s a very realistic chance that Nash would have ended up with the Wolves.
"It's really interesting because when he came out in the draft he came here and spent about three of four days with us,” Flip Saunders, who was the team’s coach in 1996, said. “He was a great person and a great individual and if we hadn't made the trade for [Stephon] Marbury there's a pretty good chance we would've taken him where we were at. We were probably going to take a point guard and he was really high on our board, we really liked him.”
Nash was also one of the best at keeping himself healthy. He played effectively until he was 40 years old. He played parts of 19 season after playing four years (113 games) at Santa Clara. That’s unheard of.
He was able to do this by taking what he did off the court as seriously as he did on the court. He had a sugar-free diet and almost always ate gluten-free cereal for breakfast, a salad for lunch and veggies with grilled chicken for dinner. Nash didn’t eat processed foods. No Cheez-Its were sitting on his pantry. No Dr. Peppers in his fridge.
“Off the court, the things that he did kind of transcended (the game) as far as how he trained and kept his body together,” says Charlotte Hornets point guard Mo Williams.
Williams, 32 years old, hopes he can play until he’s 36 or so. 40? Well, that’s certainly asking a lot.
The way Nash’s career has ended sucks. That’s a fact. It would have been great to see him going out with a championship parade. But like life, that’s not how sports work. Nash got himself into incredible shape since being acquired by the Lakers and did all he could to stay healthy, but like anyone in his 40s (especially one who has played basketball for his entire life), his body started to break down.
"To see him go out the way that he went out wasn't ideal,” Saunders said. “No one wanted to see that because we forget how good he really was.” Even now, I’m forgetting just how good Nash was. The first thing that pops into my head was the first time I saw him play in person. On March 28, 2014, Nash returned to the Lakers lineup after missing three straight games to start at point guard for the Lakers. He played 14:55 minutes, scored four points and made this pass.
But it wasn’t anything close to the player Nash was. And while yeah, that isn’t fun to think about, but it’s okay. Nash is one of the greatest point guards of all-time. He’ll be a Hall of Famer one day and we’ll watch his passes on YouTube for years to come. Chances are we’ll see Nash in a front office sometime in the near future.
All careers must come to an end.
The end of Nash's career wasn't fun, but hey, the ride there sure was.