Message Board Basketball Forum - InsideHoops - Steve Nash owes the Raptors nothing

Message Board Basketball Forum - InsideHoops (http://www.insidehoops.com/forum/index.php)

- Toronto Raptors Forum (http://www.insidehoops.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=10)

- - Steve Nash owes the Raptors nothing (http://www.insidehoops.com/forum/showthread.php?t=269999)

Steve Nash owes the Raptors nothing

http://sports.nationalpost.com/2012/...ptors-nothing/

Quote:

Someone will call him a traitor. Some people already have. Steve Nash is a Los Angeles Laker today, as far from Toronto as he ever was; he will not come and save the Raptors, even though they asked. Someone will boo him when he comes to Canada to play, wearing purple and gold. Sadly, it’s inevitable.

And they will be wrong. Nash’s entire career is based on two overriding instincts: Smart decisions, and unselfishness. He has led the league in assists five times; he has been responsible for a higher percentage of his teams’ total assists over his career than Magic Johnson was for his. Nash has altered his passing technique in certain situations because he figured the ball would get there a tenth of a second faster. If Steve Nash is on your team, he’s here to help.

But he was never overly interested in helping the Toronto Raptors, even if he would have been handsomely paid to do so. The team’s three-year, US$36-or-so-million offer was plunked on the table on Sunday, and sat untouched and lonely as he negotiated with New York and then unexpectedly approved a sign-and-trade to the Lakers on Wednesday night, along with a reported three-year, US$25-million deal. He did this despite a reported plea from Wayne Gretzky to do what he could never do, which was come back to Canada. He left the Raptors, and general manager Bryan Colangelo, to fend for themselves.

And that’s OK. It really is. Lord knows there are those who have lashed out at him before — primarily for leaving the Canadian national team after a decade of year-in-year-out service, and after they fired his friend and mentor, Jay Triano. Because Nash didn’t sign with Toronto there are going to be some who will blast him for a lack of patriotism, even after he has accepted the job as GM of Canada Basketball.

It will be ridiculous in some quarters.

But L.A. makes sense. He will play with Kobe Bryant, who has incredible respect for his game, and the contrast on the court will be fascinating. He will play with Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum — or maybe Dwight Howard, in the best-case scenario — and he will make them better too. He will make people pay for double-teams; he will organize Mike Brown’s throw-your-hands-up-and-let-Kobe-go offence. He will make space and peace on a team not known for space or peace. It’s what he can do, even at age 38.

And he’ll stay close to his three young children and his soon-to-be-ex-wife, which was a priority from the start. He will live near Hollywood, where his movie-making aspirations could bloom. And he will chase a ring.

So should he booed for that? No. If Nash just didn’t want the steady inconvenience of being a golden god in Canada, then all that does is make him like an awful lot of Canadian hockey players. Hell, Canadian or not, he’s from Victoria, went to university in California and played in Dallas and Phoenix. He’s never even lived anywhere where it snowed.

But, people will cry: Look what he could have accomplished here! And in fairness, they won’t be wrong. Toronto’s pitch was multilayered. If Nash came here he would be hailed as a hero; he would be giving our lone Canadian franchise — and by proxy basketball in Canada — an adrenaline surge unlike any it has ever seen, which would surely help future GMs of Canada Basketball. He would most likely have the option of being streamed into the front office when he retired in three years, and presumably he would eventually be running the show, if that’s what he wanted. Oh, and he would get paid. A patriotic golden parachute, festooned with a bow.

But the basketball itself — the actual basketball — what was so attractive about Toronto? Helping a mismatched crew of middling talent strive for the playoffs, maximizing flawed players in a flawed design, creating offence out of whole cloth … well, wasn’t that essentially what he has had to do in Phoenix for the last two seasons? Here are Andrea Bargnani, DeMar DeRozan, some interchangeable big men, a small forward to be named later and a teenage Lithuanian. Please take our money, and make them work.

While so many in Canada were shouting for him to demand a trade from Phoenix to a contender, so as not to waste his considerable remaining talents — free Steve Nash, we shouted, free Steve Nash — wasn’t asking him to sign with Toronto asking him to enter a situation that, in basketball terms, was all too similar to the one he would be inheriting?

Instead, he took less money to play for a contender, and to stay close to his kids. Boo that if you like.

Nash’s best chance at a title came in Phoenix, where his first playoff run in 2005 was derailed when shooting guard Joe Johnson suffered a broken face; the 2007 run was betrayed when he was gashed in the nose in a critical game and couldn’t stop bleeding, and then Stoudemire and his backup, Boris Diaw, were suspended for an important game for running off the bench after Nash was knocked into a scorer’s table by Robert Horry; 2008 saw Stoudemire sidelined by surgery. Hell, he played a playoff game — and won it — with one eye swollen shut two years ago. Steve Nash has had some rotten luck. We’ll see what he has left.

Nash has given as much to the sport in this country as almost anybody else and he isn’t done doing so. He left the national team because of Triano, but also to maximize his remarkable career. Steve Nash didn’t owe it to the Raptors to turn a Hall of Fame career into a charity case and to be their saviour. Just because they made a mess, it doesn’t mean he had to clean it up. Instead, we get to see him on the high wire again, playing games that really matter, again. If you’re a fan of Canadian basketball — and of Steve Nash’s incredible exploration of possibility — what the hell would you rather see?