NBA

NBA Top 50: Steve Nash (No. 13)

Posted Sep 24, 2008 11:00AM By Tom Ziller (RSS feed)

Filed Under: Suns

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FanHouse's Tom Ziller argues his ranking of the top 50 players in the NBA.

Steve Nash's legacy needs no padding, obviously. Two MVPs don't come often -- Jerry West never won one. Thousands of kids have emulated Nash on the playgrounds this decade, and thousands more will continue to try to play Nash's style as his career tails off. Jason Kidd won't be forgotten, nor will Gary Payton or Brevin Knight. But the stylistic idol of this era of point guards will most certainly be Nash.

What's more: he's already influencing the game's top young point guards, like Chris Paul.

Paul is one of the best, most endearing young players the NBA has to offer. At age 23, he shows off canny maturity on the court: he knows exactly where to attack, how to throw even a great defense (like Dallas and San Antonio in the playoffs) off-balance, how to get his bigs and wings on the same path. These aren't unique traits for a point guard. But the way in which Paul executes them ... it's Nashian. The easiest example: the dribble-through. Nash keeps his dribble alive. Always. On penetration, if nothing's there around the rim, he'll dribble to the baseline and bring it back out. Too many point guards have the mindset that when they get within five feet of the rim, a decision must be made and no further circumstance can change the decision. You might drop off a pass if an opposing big lunges at you, but there's no real "stopping" now: the possession will be ended.

Nash, of course, lets the possession remain fungible. Every option is on the table on every dribble-drive. He might scoop it off the glass, he might drop it to Amare, he might lob it for Marion (R.I.P.), he might kick it to Raja, he might see no clear options and dribble out along the left baseline, then hit a cutting Barbosa in the lane. Nash begins his penetration with no preconceived notions of exactly how the possession will go. Most point guards give themselves one or two options.

Paul has mimicked this flawlessly. CP3 might turn to the alley-oop more often, but it's not a requirement. This isn't to say Paul aped this off Nash, and that he and Byron Scott aren't able to have an original thought or strategy. But it seems absolutely clear that this innovation (insomuch as it is one) has been popularized by Nash and the D'Antoni offense, and it has made its way into the repertoire of one of Nash's heirs.

Casting Nash as an inventor isn't the full story, of course: Nash has also been one of the game's best players in every practical sense. He can only do what he does by having such a deadly jump shot: you can't slack off him, lest you want to be killed by a thousand easy jumpers. He's one of few in the NBA who force the defense to adjust to his game. For a spate of the league's top offensive wings, the gameplan is largely the same: double on possession, trap on the edges, take away their best hand (you know, how teams should theoretically force Manu right every time). You can't pull something out of the box for Nash: he demands a special strategy. The plots Dallas used in the '05-06 Western finals (as documented in Jack McCallum's excellent Seven Seconds or Less) wouldn't apply to any other point guard in the league ... but they were necessary to slow down Nash, and by extension the Suns. Every coach in the NBA has a Nash strategy. Most don't work, of course, but he's one of the few teams must try to contain at all costs.

I'm still waiting for Nash's back to render him an afterthought. A lot of us -- myself certainly included -- put far too much faith in Mark Cuban's judgment in 2004 when he said Nash wasn't worth a paltry $10 million a year. It's a cop-out (and uninformed) to insist Nash is the hardest-working player in the league -- just because he's white and unathletic but won the MVP twice doesn't mean he's had to work harder than Elton Brand or Dirk Nowitzki or Kobe Bryant or Tim Duncan or Paul. Every player at this level works hard. That said, it's easy to imagine a world in which Nash didn't take every precaution to protect his health, to develop his mechanics, to lead the Suns to the heights. Thank God we don't live in that world, and here's to another half-decade of Nash brilliance.

Tags: NBATop50, SteveNash

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