Springfield, Mass — Steve Nash isn’t ready to be a Hall of Famer, which sucks for him, because the greatest Canadian basketball player (athlete?) of all-time and one of the very best point guards in NBA history is just that, whether he likes it or not.
It was made official six month ago when he was named a member of the 2018 class of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. It will become very real on Friday night when Nash and his fellow inductees – Grant Hill, Jason Kidd, Ray Allen and women’s legends Tina Thompson and Katie Smith, to name a few – take the microphone and try to put into words what the honour means to them in front of gathered friends, family, basketball luminaries and a live television audience.
But Nash is almost still in denial. As of Thursday afternoon, he hadn’t written his speech and even though he was at the Hall to be presented with his commemorative orange jacket, he still hasn’t quite come to grips with what it all means.
“You put walls up a little bit,” said Nash who retired as a two-time MVP, third all-time in assists and as one of the most precise shooters the league has ever seen. “I’m not very sentimental, to a fault.
“You kind of know you’re going to get in because everyone tells you you’re going to get in and then they tell you [you’re in] and you kind of keep it right there where it is, instead of really digesting it and living with it,” he said. “That’s really a thing a lot of us men are good at: avoiding emotionally dissecting or digesting something.”
There will be plenty of people happy to help. Nash is expecting a large crowd of childhood friends, college teammates, national team buddies and former coaches to be in the audience to help remind him that yeah, becoming just the second Canadian player (Vancouver’s Bob Houbregs is the other) to be inducted into the Hall of Fame is a bit of a thing.
That it matters so much to others is what makes it most bearable to the greatest Canadian hoopster of all time.
“To a fault I shy away from not just the attention but the reflection,” said Nash, who has devoted his post-retirement years to some light lifting as a consultant with the Golden State Warriors; a peripheral role with the Canadian senior men’s national team and his charitable foundation but mostly to being the guy who makes breakfast and picks the kids up after school back home in Manhattan Beach. His twice-a-week pick-up soccer games and some beach volleyball are his athletic outlets.
“My default is I just want to get back to my wife and kids and hang out,” he said. “But with so many people coming this weekend and sharing in this moment for me is something that I think deserves celebration and thanks.
“I started playing when I was 13 and retired at 40. That’s a lot of teammates, a lot of coaches, a lot of mentors, a lot of people to thank and a lot of people to that that deserve to celebrate the success because I definitely couldn’t have done it without them.”
Fortunately, others are willing to speak on behalf of the 18-year NBA veteran and long-time national team stalwart, but the theme doesn’t shift much. Even in his ultimate professional moment he was remembered for what he did for others:
“Obviously, his talent was off the charts. He could shoot the ball – before Steph Curry he was the best shooting point guard we’ve ever seen. His ability to facilitate was off the charts,” said Hill, who played with Nash in Phoenix for five seasons towards the end of their respective careers. “But I think his spirit really brings a team together … he brought that to practice, to games any time we were together as a team. That’s what made him special.
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“Some point guards will pass you the ball and if you drop it or he throws an alley-oop and you miss it, they won’t pass it to you because they don’t want a turnover,” said Hill. “If you miss two [shots] in a row they won’t come back to you. You miss two in a row, he’s coming back to you and it’s ‘bad pass, my fault.’ It wasn’t a bad pass, I missed it … there would be games when the mismatch was him on a big and he’d be shooting the ball more than usual and he’d apologize. That’s kind of who he was.”
Off the court, too.
Also being enshrined Friday is long-time NBA executive Rick Welts, the brains behind the NBA’s All-Star weekend, the marketing of the Dream Team and the founding of the WNBA while working at the league office prior to successful stints leading the Phoenix Suns and now the Golden State Warriors. He also made news in 2011 when as president of the Suns he became the first major sports executive to publicly acknowledge he was gay.
“The New York Times wanted to publish that story as a front-page story, and because I’d done my job moderately well, no one knew who I was,” said Welts. “But among the people I had worked with in my career, everybody knew [I was gay] so Steve was among a handful of people who I asked if they would be willing to tell my story and Steve was Steve, he said ‘I can’t even believe this is a story, this is 2011’, but he spent a ton of time with the Times for the article and it really meant a lot to me at an important time in my life.”
The accolades are everywhere.
Nash deserves to be in the Hall on his own merits but his enshrinement is justifiably being viewed as validation for his effect on the style of basketball he helped introduce with the run-and-gun Suns that has become en vogue now – up-tempo, floor spread, pass-heavy and shots being taken from all angles. By this line of thinking Nash is not only a luminary but symbol.
He can see that one coming and deflects it like a poorly timed pass:
“I don’t take any credit for this new generation of guards,” he said, looking fit and trim enough at age 44 that he could still play 20 minutes a night were it not for the recurring nerve issues in his back and legs that made his last couple of the years in the league an injury-plagued purgatory. “I think all together we influenced the next generation of guards. I think all together we influenced the next generation and they’re influencing the generation after them. It’s kind of like a wave, from the beginning of the game until now so you ride a bit of that wave, but we all shared in it. It’s the nature of the game and of life. I’m just a big fan of the game today.”
The feeling is mutual, Nash just doesn’t know what to do now that a career spent grinding away as an underdog – “scrapping and clawing” – is well over and he’s ended up on top, the spotlight shining bright.
There are plenty of emotions, surely. He’s just not ready to process them all yet, even though the clock is ticking and he’s got a speech to make.
“I wouldn’t bet on the crying,” he said when asked if the moment might overwhelm him. “Stranger things have happened. But I better put some thoughts down on paper.”
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