I Heart Basketball
Steve Nash & The System
Steven Nash is a very good basketball player. In fact, for the past two years he’s been voted the most important player for what may become the most important team to play in the NBA in years. Amazingly, this man has never scored more than 19 points a game. His awards are testaments to basketball the way it was meant to be played—that is to say; how it was played in the ‘50’s, ’60,’s and ‘80’s—and the adulation of his team’s style of play is simply nostalgia for a happier time—for basketball anyways. But this sudden transformation begs a simple question (echoed by Mark Cuban). Where was this Steve Nash before he joined the Phoenix Suns? Now, don’t get me wrong; He was a very good player long before he joined the Suns, a two-time all star (not a two-time MVP). Here’s the real question, at what point did this six foot three inch dude become the best player in the league. How did he make such a precipitous jump in ability at the age of 31, and what does this mean for the rest of us?
One would think that most times, and in most vocations, a person’s ability is mostly quantifiable. A person is good at their job or they aren’t. A person is fun or terrible. Things are black and things are white. There is no in between when it comes to yes and no questions. Salesmen are salesmen and marketers are marketers. And in general, this is true. People tend to float from job to job until they find a vocation suited to their general (and specific) skill set. In sports, this often does not happen, and there is a simple reason why; athletes have chosen their field, and when a player changes teams he is doing precisely that. He is changing his incorporated municipality (with a shared tax base), not changing jobs.
But here’s the weird thing, and the reason Steve Nash is my frame of reference. In basketball, more often than not, superstars are easily quantifiable. They are (almost) always obviously better at the sport than their peers and most times their dominance is easily viewed visually, i.e. Lebron James is, physically, the most talented basketball player I’ve ever seen. This should not be misconstrued as anything other than an obvious fact. I’m sure Lebron James spent hours and hours honing his craft and nothing (besides a 100 million dollar deal from Nike) was given to him, but when one looks at Lebron James, Carmelo Anthony or Amare Stoudemire; one sees a person better suited to play basketball than oneself. Now, so far this hasn’t really been an argument as much as a restatement of the obvious. We all know that Carmelo Anthony is a stellar athlete. What I’m wondering is how come no one knew Steve Nash was such a great basketball player? In a sport where fundamental strengths—as well as deficiencies—are always on display, how come no one knew Steve Nash would excel—the way he did--as a Sun? The answer is at one time both exceedingly obvious enough and sufficiently layered enough to be interesting.
First, Steven Nash is not physically imposing, he has never averaged 30 points per game—nor has he scored 50—and he isn’t a fixture on SportsCenter for his own dunking exploits. In short, he is not the type of player who is supposed to take over a game.
However, there is an obvious problem with this logic. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of basketball—as I’m sure anyone making a stop at this site possesses—knows the inherent importance of a good point guard. What happened when the Nets got Jason Kidd ( a guy who scores 14 points per game)? They immediately became legitimate World Title contenders. In 1980, the Lakers went from a team without a direction to NBA champions because Magic Johnson began running the show. John Stockton went to the playoffs for 1,234,432,234 straight years and he scored something like 15 points a game. The point guard position is the only position on the basketball court where points are secondary, so why do people constantly over-emphasize points when evaluating talent. If a pre-requisite for point guard play was filling it up then the Knicks would be a great team, and Stephon Marbury never would have been traded 24 times in the first place. This is the layered part of the problem. The point guard position is the only position on a basketball court that is not easily quantifiable. Points and rebounds are easily distinguishable, but successfully running a team is not. Of course, we could use assists, but that is actually a flawed system. Let’s take a look at this; an assist occurs only when a player directly causes a teammate to score. Well, the same point guard surrounded by poor talent would not have nearly as many assists as his incantation would have on a stellar squad. This type of statistical gray area creates a murkier picture for understanding true talent form the guard spot. The problem is that to truly be great, a point guard has to have other great players around him, but does that mean he is truly great? What came first the chicken or the egg, the sock or the shoe? Well, Jason Kidd inherited a team (the Nets) that were awful a year before and took them to the Finals. Steve Nash inherited a 20 something win team and took them to 62 victories and a berth in the Bestern Conference Finals. Obviously, their play was integral to their teams’ respective turnarounds. So, the query still remains, why was Nash overlooked?
I think a great place to look for this is in another sport; namely football. This quandary occurs all the time in that physical endeavor. Players excel in one system only to flounder in another or vice versa. For example, once upon a time Steve Young was benched when he was plying his trade for a terrible Tampa Bay squad. Eventually He was labeled a bust and (basically) given to the 49ers. Five years later, he was starting in the Pro Bowl for the San Francisco 49ers. What happened? The answer is obvious; he found a system that fit him. The reason this happens in football is simple; successful coaches create a system and then find players to fit it (unsuccessful coaches don’t find those players), and this happens all the time. Would Emmitt Smith have been as great as he was if Jimmy Johnson hadn’t surrounded him with other great players and an offensive line that by my count averaged 894 pounds. The answer is probably not, but that doesn’t matter because he found a system that fit him. This is a common occurrence in football, but it doesn’t happen often in basketball and there is a simple reason. Football is complex, basketball is not. There are 22 players on a football field at any one time and 53 separate players on each team, and this means that the system is more important than any one player. Basketball is usually different because the players—not the coaches—create the system. What this means is that in basketball the players are (almost) always more significant than the coaches. The Phoenix Suns are an exception. They wanted to create a system, and they knew that the only way to create their system was to go out and find the best available prospect to run it. They were able to find Nash because they were able to forecast that their system would fit his skill set better than the one he was currently inhabiting and they were able to do this because…. well I don’t know how they figured that one out.
posted by Double Deuce @ 12:01 AM
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