People tend to forget things. Perhaps due to selective memory,or perhaps it’s just a natural process of the mind that attempts to keepthe most current and relevant information at the forefront of yourrecollection. Myself, I tend to forget things when my mind ispreoccupied with other things.
You then can imagine my dismay when I when I wake up in South Texas, the land of the hot and humid even in December, to realize everything outside is frozen over worse than Antoine Walker on a bad shooting night. Some ridiculous weather phenomenon has decided to wreak unholy frigid hell on most of the country, the usually warm southern region not withstanding. If you ask me it’s old man winter being a bitch after we got away with seventy degree weather during Thanksgiving and Christmas down here.
This particular brand of bitch slapping, cold snapping, frostbiting weather, leaves you with little a choice but to choose some indooractivity. Thankfully, I’m a writer, and sunlight scares me anyway.Stereotypically I’m supposed to lock myself in a room and avoid humancontact until I conjure some sort of literary achievement of worth.Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to go outside, but my front door isliterally frozen shut and the roads are unsafe anyway.
Perfect, I think to myself, holding a cup of tea and staring ata blinking cursor, I can focus on this here column. The problem is thatevery few seconds I can’t help but glance out the window and noticethere’s a icicle the size of my arm hanging from the neighbor’scarport. When you’ve lived in a warm climate your entire life, that’slike trying focus while a naked juggler goes by walking on his hands,spitting nickels, while doing disco - it’s so weird it’s unnerving.
What does any of this have to do with Steve Nash? I couldn’tfigure it out for a while myself, but rest assured there is a method to mymadness. In the most ridiculous form of trying to focus I could thinkof, I tried thinking ’warm thoughts’. And I thought of Steve Nash.Because he plays in Phoenix. For the Suns. No, I’m not joking.
But cold weather is not all that brings you this piece, becauseas I said at the top of this article, what I’m about to write about is verymuch about forgetting. Because of uncomfortable weather, I forgot (andremembered) the most obvious choice of topic - the best player in theleague and the most valuable player on any one team.
Because of indifference, or simply not paying attention, somefolks may have forgotten a certain statement that was made about Steve Nash during a recent nationally broadcasted game. Some of you may not have even seen or heard it, but it’s worth discussing regardless. I don’t remember the exact game, or date, but I remember clearly enough what was said. Bill Walton, wonderful pundit that he is, made the ’observation’ that was made at the very outset of this article, thatonly three players in history of the MVP have ever won the award threetimes consecutively. These players are Larry Bird, Wilt Chamberlain,and Bill Russell, in case you didn’t know.
Bill went on to say that Steve Nash should not win the awardthis season, because it would unjustly put him in the same company as those great players. Simply put, Walton, and many of Nash’s critics, feelcontent to gleefully ignore any comparisons to the current crop ofAssociation players, and the fact that Nash is more valuable to histeam, than any of them are to theirs.
It’s one thing to disregard the issue at hand and introduce asecondary one, it’s completely different thing when your secondaryissue (you know, the one that’s irrelevant), it also wrong. If theSteve Nash critics would like to deny Nash the MVP trophy on thegrounds that he isn’t as influential to his generation as Bird,Chamberlain, and Russell were to theirs, well I have some news tobreak to you.
Yes he is.
Steve Nash is as dominant and consistent a force in basketballnow, as Bird, Chamberlain, and Russell were in their times. Get thatthrough your noggin. Now I’m sure at this point there’s some sort ofbasketball fundamentalist alarm going off in your head that’s urgingto find a basketball bible (or write one) so you can smack me over thehead with it. And then preferably burn me at the stake. Hold on there,allow me to explain.
First of all, I’m not about to imply there isn’t some sort ofrelativity in my statement. We’re talking about three entirelydifferent eras of basketball, and there exists drastic differencesbetween them. I would be remiss if I didn’t address that outright. Theway the game is played now, the way it was played in the 80s, and theway it was played in the 60s leave us with a great deal ofinconsistencies when it comes to comparing anything from thesedifferent points in time. So any direct comparisons have to go out thewindow. What that leaves us with is an inexact exchange rate of sorts,a relative comparison, if you will.
Chamberlain and Russell played at a time when big men ruled the league, and they dominated, Bird played at a time that essentiallyconsisted of him and Magic Johnson reviving the league, but besidesthat I’d say the 80s were marked by overly physical play and harddefense.
Steve Nash doesn’t play in a league like that. In fact, SteveNash plays in a league that’s just the opposite. Great big men aren’t quite as prevalent as they used to be (Dwight Howard, Andrew Bynum, and the ’coming soon’ Greg Oden might change that) and defense and physicality are being all but outlawed by Sheriff Stern. Nash plays in a league that’s becoming smaller, faster, and more about finesse and clever play than anything else, and his game epitomizes that. That, inessence, is why Nash is as good as he is, because he’s a reflection ofwhat today’s game is about, and he’s the best at it.
Nash has mastered his generation’s style of play the same wayother great players have done with theirs in the past. If you want tocompare eras as a more accurate measuring method, that’s somethingdifferent. If you don’t like today’s brand of basketball, more powerto you, but it is what it is, it’s not going to change any time soon,and Nash and his Suns are the prime example of how small ball, quickshooting, and little defense can actually work.
Nash isn’t physically or athletically imposing, and no, he isn’texactly your top pick for a defensive stopper. But he is deceptivelyquick, awkwardly resourceful, a great shooter, able to penetrate, amaster playmaker, and a perfect passer. But more importantly than hisskill set or his numbers is the fact that he is the driving forcebehind the Phoenix Suns.
I don’t care what anyone says, the Suns don’t play defense. Andplayers and coaches have admitted that often times there are nooffensive sets called in the half court, that Steve Nash just createsand they follow his lead. Think about that for a second, a team withno defense, but the best offense wins 60 games a year, and thatoffense is completely dependent on one man - are you beginning to getthe picture of what ’most valuable’ means?
I’ve got nothing but good things to say about Kobe Bryant; I’vegot nothing but goods things to say about my guy Agent Zero, aka Gilbert Arenas. And Dirk Nowitzki infuriates me to no end, but the man can straight up ball with the best of them, and I give him major props forthat. There are few, if any knocks I can throw at the other MVPcandidates this year, but they don’t do what Steve Nash does.
There was a time when we had to worry about people notrecognizing just how good Steve Nash is, I was guilty of it myself at one point. Now our worry shouldn’t be that people forget how good he still is, that isn’t likely to happen any time soon. What we as objectivebasketball observers should be weary of is that Nash, despite howgreat he is and all of his accomplishments, still has haters, peoplewho still don’t believe he’s as good as he is.
Some time around last season, when Nash was on his way to asecond straight MVP, his remarkable play without the likes of the loadedlineup he once had in Joe Johnson, Quentin Richardson, and AmareStoudemire (hurt last season), made me forget all the reasons I everhad to doubt his first MVP award. Something tells me that by season’send, he’ll have given all his remaining doubters a third reason to dothe same.
