All Ball Sports: Steve Nash, Free at Last
by Paul Teetor
Steve Nash is the luckiest man in professional sports.
Wait.
What?
Is that the same Steve Nash who was fired/terminated/mutually agreed to part ways as the head coach of the New Jersey Nets last week?
Yep.
It’s the very same 10-year Manhattan Beach resident who will return to his seaside home free at last of the craziness surrounding the most unstable franchise in the NBA — and that’s saying a lot for a league that has more than a couple of crazy, egomaniacal, multi-billionaire owners and half a dozen incompetent general managers.
Now he will get to decompress from nearly three years of non-stop chaos, and super-stress derived from dealing with four of the NBA’s biggest knuckleheads: dumbass point guard Kyrie Irving, shooter supreme Kevin Durant, bucket machine James Harden, and talented-but-mentally-troubled forward Ben Simmons.
The craziness reached its peak two weeks ago, when Irving tweeted a link to an antisemitic documentary, and posted a screenshot of its online rental page to Instagram. The film, which shall go nameless in this column, is now number one in the “religion/faith” category.
The fallout has been swift and steady ever since Irving made such a reckless, irresponsible decision — except from his fellow players, the league office and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, who just happens to be Jewish (a fact All Ball would never mention except that in this most unusual case it is relevant.)
But Irving’s sponsors like sneaker giant Nike, religious leaders of all faiths, and various New York civic leaders have all roundly condemned Irving and, in some cases, cut ties with him. In other words, he has become the hoops version of Kanye West: a blatant bigot becoming more toxic by the day.
The good news for Nash is that the extreme reaction to Irving’s latest craziness hasn’t dragged him into the PR vortex left in its wake.
It can’t be blamed on Nash, or his coaching, since it all happened starting the day after the media was notified that Nash was leaving the Nets. The exact terminology – fired, walked away on his own, or some hybrid combination of those two very different descriptors – doesn’t matter.
The bottom line is Nash is done in Brooklyn, and good for him. He’s too classy as both a two-time NBA MVP, as a person who treats everyone he meets with respect, and dignity, and as a guy who will surely get another chance to be an NBA head coach to be associated even one day longer with such a dysfunctional, disorganized mess of a franchise.
Of course, Nash never should have accepted Brooklyn’s invitation to coach their team in the first place. But it was his first coaching job on any level – except for helping the little kids at American Martyrs School — and it was an understandable rookie mistake.
But now, like any smart point guard who realizes he has made a mistake, he has moved to rectify it. And he surely will not repeat it.
But since some NBA pundits still cling to the idea that Nash didn’t walk away without being pushed out, that he was not a good coach and deserved to be fired, it’s helpful to review the sequence of events that led to the turmoil of the last few weeks.
As Nets GM Sean Marks admitted the day the news broke, “Steve never had a level playing field his entire time here.”
This fractured fairytale started back in June 2019, when Durant ruptured his Achilles tendon during the NBA finals while trying to help the Golden State Warriors win their third straight NBA title. Since Durant had been named MVP of the 2017 and 2018 NBA Finals, it’s fair to think that he could have led the Warriors to yet another championship.
But he got hurt, which ended that dream. Meanwhile, he had been hearing for two years that he wasn’t good enough to lead his own Oklahoma City team to a title and that’s why he had decided to jump onto the Warriors bandwagon and chase titles with them.
A super-sensitive type of guy who has admitted publicly that he smokes weed every day, Durant has never claimed to be a leader with a Type-A personality. He’s a laid-back hipster who just loves to play ball and smoke weed, and that’s about it.
Kyrie, on the other hand, is a raging narcissist who, by his own description, is a “truth seeker and a beacon of light” in a dark world.
In other words, a leader who will take you right over a cliff. And that’s exactly what he did to Durant, who had declared him his best friend while he was still with the Warriors.
That summer the two amigos said they were determined to play together and whatever team signed Durant – at that time the undisputed best player in the world — would have to also sign Irving to a maximum deal.
They chose the Nets over the New York Knicks, they said, because they liked the culture Coach Kenny Atkinson had developed by insisting his players play a hard-nosed, hustling style that puts defense ahead of offense.
For the 2019-20 season Durant sat out the whole year to rehab his injury, and collected $40 million from the Nets while doing so. Kyrie played 20 games, then claimed to be injured and missed the rest of the season.
After the season Kyrie decided he didn’t like Atkinson and in fact didn’t even need a coach.
“I could coach the team,” a perfectly serious Kyrie said on his podcast. “We don’t really need a coach with KD and me on the team.”
So the Nets capitulated and fired Atkinson, who is so widely respected around the league that he soon found a new job and is now the top assistant to Coach Steve Kerr with Golden State.
Then the Nets shocked the hoops world by announcing that they were hiring Nash as their new coach.
Immediately, Stephen A. Smith, the always bombastic ESPN sports shouter, declared it a bad hire and a blatant case of “white privilege.”
Nash was too smart to respond and let his team do his talking for him. In his first season, they made it to the Eastern Conference Semifinals, where they took the eventual champion Milwaukee Bucks to seven games. In that final game, Durant hit a last-second miracle shot that appeared to be a three-pointer that won the game, but instead a video review revealed that his toe had touched the 3-point line and it was declared a two-pointer that merely tied the game before the Bucks won in overtime.
“My big-ass foot cost us the game and the series,” Durant declared after the game.
When Nash’s second season started, the Nets seemed to get a huge break when Houston Rockets superstar James Harden demanded a trade and declared he wanted to join Durant and Irving in Brooklyn.
He got his wish – although the Nets had to give up most of their young talent and future draft picks — and suddenly Nash had what looked like the most potent offensive team in NBA history. But when the pandemic hit, Kyrie refused to get vaccinated, making him unable to play. Durant got hurt and that left Harden all alone to carry the team, a burden he eventually tired of.
Soon Harden was demanding another trade, this time to Philadelphia, which just happened to have its own problem child in Ben Simmons, who was sitting out the season in a contract dispute/mental breakdown/petulant fit of pique after he was mocked and humiliated for refusing to shoot the ball when he had a wide-open layup in a crucial playoff game the Sixers ultimately lost.
Before long Philly and Brooklyn exchanged their problems for each other. Harden went on to play decently for Philly, but Simmons insisted he wasn’t ready to play yet, had a shoulder injury, a hamstring injury, a brain injury – any excuse that would keep him from having to actually, you know, play the game he was being paid to play.
Nash did his best to handle all the craziness, but in the end Simmons didn’t play a minute for Brooklyn and the Nets were swept by the Boston Celtics in the first round of the playoffs. Now Stephen A. Smith and his amen chorus were calling for Nash’s firing. When that didn’t work, Durant – who had just signed a 4-year, $250 million contract – issued an ultimatum: fire Nash and General Manager Sean Marks, or he would simply refuse to play.
Nets owner Joe Tsai – a Hong Kong-Canadian billionaire businessman – was smart enough to call Durant’s bluff and demand that Durant fulfill his contract with Nash and Marks staying in their jobs.
Durant eventually came crawling back, but the tension on the team – once you’ve called for your boss to be fired, it can be a little awkward in the workplace – made for an unworkable situation.
When the Nets got off to a 1-5 start, Tsai realized he had to do something drastic, and at the same time Nash had had enough.
This week, as Nash arrived home to play some tennis with his buddies at the Manhattan Beach Country Club, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver finally spoke out about Kyrie and summoned him for a meeting next week to explain that posting antisemitic tweets was not good PR for the league.
And the Nets, after a week of silence, finally announced that Kyrie was being suspended for a minimum of five games and would have to prove that he had seen the error of his ways, and washed the hate out of his heart before he would be allowed to return to the team.
And LeBron, who has been such a warrior for social justice that Fox News host Laura Ingraham told him to “shut up and dribble,” a couple of years ago, finally found his voice a week after Kyrie posted his disgusting tweet.
“I think he caused some harm to a lot of people,” LeBron said. “I don’t condone it.”
So why would LeBron, who wasn’t afraid to call Donald Trump “a bum” when Trump was attacking black football players to inflame racial divisions, pull his punches when criticizing his old Cleveland Cavaliers teammate?
Perhaps because LeBron has been pleading with the Lakers for the past four months to trade Russell Westbrook for Kyrie. But the Nets demanded that the Lakers include their 2027 and 2029 first round draft picks, the only picks the Lakers have left to trade.
So far, the Lakers have resisted those demands. But now that the Nets have finally had it with Kyrie, they may be ready to do business with the Lakers and accept Westbrook plus one of those picks.
It’s Nash’s worst nightmare: Nash and Kyrie reunited in LA.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. Follow: @paulteetor ER
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