All Ball: Steve Nash due back in Manhattan, Dodger Bauer’s departure overdue
If only Nash’s Nets were as disciplined as American Martyrs players. Photo by Brad Jacobson
by Paul Teetor
If you see Steve Nash around Manhattan Beach this summer, give him a big hug – or at least say hey and let him know his adopted hometown still loves him.
Whether it’s from his tennis buddies at the Manhattan Beach Country club and Live Oak Park, or his beach buddies at 30th Street where he and his family hang out on sunny summer days, he needs to feel the same kind of love he felt for so long as one of the greatest point guards in NBA history, a 15th overall draft pick who beat the odds to become a two-time NBA MVP.
It’s important right now because it feels like the sporting world has turned on the Brooklyn Nets head coach after his team was swept in the first round of the NBA playoffs this week.
The leading sports yakker in the land – Stephen A. Smith, host of the ESPN shout fest First Take – led the charge.
“Steve Nash has to go,” Smith said the morning after the Nets lost game four to the Boston Celtics to complete the sweep. “No disrespect to Nash, I like Steve Nash, he was a great player, but the Nets need a new voice to bring in a new culture there.”
Smith’s main point: Nash is too nice a guy, too much a player’s coach, too new-age, too sensitive to players’ feelings to crack the whip on a team with a bunch of misfit characters who say, and do whatever they want and play however they want.
The suggested cure: bring in an old-school coach who will lay down the law, demand strict attention to detail and impose consequences when players go off on their own. Of course, that formula no longer works in the NBA, but what the hell….let’s try it!
The other frequent criticism: Nash doesn’t scream at the refs enough. Too laid back. Too agreeable.
The suggested cure: An old-school coach will ride the refs from tip-off to final buzzer, giving his team an edge in crucial last-minute calls that could go either way. Of course, that tactic no longer works because the refs are so heavily trained in the rules of the game, and so aware that every call is being evaluated by the league office, that they’ve become robotic in their calls. But what the hell….let’s try it!
Other media voices quickly joined in the chorus. The New York papers who cover the Nets – the NY Post, NY Daily News, even the august NY Times – ran stories speculating on who might replace Nash after just two years on the job.
Fortunately for Nash, the most important voice in the entire debate over his future, star player Kevin Durant, still supports him.
“Steve was dealt a crazy hand this year,” Durant said a day after the fire-Nash movement got started, and was already picking up momentum. “I think he’s the right coach for this team.”
As long as Durant has his back, Nash’s job is safe. That’s the power of a superstar in the modern NBA. Durant is every bit as powerful in New York as LeBron James is in Los Angeles.
But in the topsy-turvy world of pro basketball, things can change awfully quickly. Just ask LeBron James and the Lakers, who started the season as the favorites to meet the Nets in the NBA Finals, but ended up missing the playoffs completely by finishing 11th in the Western Conference.
Meanwhile the Nets had to win a play-in game just to get the seventh seed in the Eastern Conference, which set them up against the second-seeded Boston Celtics, who just happened to be the hottest team in the entire league since January 1.
Four games later they were headed for summer vacation, and Nash was feeling the heat for the first time since the Phoenix Suns drafted him as an unknown guy from virtually unknown Santa Clara way back in 1996.
So, let’s review how the Nets got to the point that Nash was, in Durant’s words, dealt a crazy hand this season.
It started last season, when Nash, without any prior coaching experience other than helping the little kids at American Martyrs School learn basketball fundamentals, was named the Nets coach for a team that already had Durant, a top-five player, and point guard Kyrie Irving, a top-20 player and the top knucklehead.
That’s a dubious honor in a league with more than its fair share of knuckleheads, guys who are intoxicated by too much money, too much adulation, too many willing women, and too many social media followers. Most of them never understand that they are famous for putting a leather ball through a metal hoop and will soon be replaced by other guys even better at it.
KD and Kyrie had forged an alliance, and agreed to move to the same team even as Durant was finishing out his third and last year with the Golden State Warriors, where he won two championships with Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. He left because he wanted to be seen as a leader of his own title-winning team, rather than as a guy who joined the Warriors to chase championships.
Durant was eyeballing the New York Knicks, but Irving – the stronger personality of the two – convinced him to join him in Brooklyn and Durant reluctantly went along with it. But Nets coach Kenny Atkinson, who had built a culture of hard work and accountability with a plucky band of over-achievers, was fired in the summer of 2020. Nash was the surprise choice as his replacement.
Up to that point no one was even aware that Nash wanted to coach in the NBA. He seemed perfectly happy building his dream home in MB, playing his new favorite sport of tennis and starting a new family. But that all changed with the Nets bombshell announcement that he would lead their team.
His tenure got off to a rocky start when Smith said Nash had jumped the line ahead of several Black assistant coaches who had paid their dues, and were more deserving of such a plum job with such a stacked roster.
It was a blatant case of “white privilege,” he said. Nash was classy enough to ignore him and the media storm over those comments soon passed. After all, Nash didn’t hire himself – that was done by Nets owner Joe Tsai and General Manager Sean Marks. If there was any white privilege going on, they should have to answer for it.
Not Nash.
And his unconventional hiring did make a certain amount of sense. NBA history shows that point guards who have played the pro game tend to make the best coaches in the NBA – guys like Doc Rivers, Jason Kidd and Mark Jackson. After all, they have been on-court leaders all their careers and, just as important, have had to make split-second decisions all game long.
Then just as the “white privilege” debate was dying down, Irving jumped in by saying during training camp that the team had so much talent with both him and Durant on the roster that they didn’t really need a coach. They could coach themselves.
Again, Nash was smart enough to ignore the disrespect implicit in that remark and everyone moved on.
A month into the season, Nash caught another break when another top-10 talent, James Harden of the Houston Rockets, made it clear he wanted out of Houston by playing so badly that the team was forced to trade him. He chose the Nets over his other final choice, Philadelphia, and before Nash could catch his breath he now had three superstars who were all elite scorers. His biggest challenge would be getting them to share the basketball and play some defense.
But there was a downside too: now Nash was expected to win a title in his very first year.
Over the course of his first season Nash proved a quick learner and led the Nets all the way to a game 7 loss in the conference semi-finals to the Milwaukee Bucks, who went on to win the NBA title.
Nets fans drew much hope and inspiration from the reality that they were an inch short – literally – of winning that series when a Durant three-pointer at the game 7 buzzer was ruled a two-pointer because his front toe had touched the three-point line.
“My big-assed foot cost us the series,” a chagrined Durant said afterwards.
Coming into this season the Nets were heavy favorites to win the whole thing. No team had nearly as much firepower as the Nets did with Durant, Irving and Harden.
Then things started going haywire and never really stopped.
First Irving announced he was not going to get vaccinated against Covid-19, even though Durant and Harden had reluctantly gotten their shots for the good of the team. Under New York City’s vax policy requiring indoor workers to be vaccinated, that meant Irving would not be able to play in Nets home games.
Irving, who said he “wanted to be a voice for the voiceless” who opposed the mandate, didn’t change his mind for the good of the team. He saw only the bright side: he would still be able to play in the away games, except in places like Toronto, which had a similar policy to New York’s.
Nets management saw where this was going – total chaos and anarchy, the inmates running the asylum – and quickly decreed that until Irving got his vaccination he would not be allowed to play in any games at all.
But there was a catch: because he said he was available to play in the away games, he would still be paid for those games. Thus he would earn $18 million for not playing.
That bizarre arrangement lasted about half the season, until Harden got sick of all the Kyrie craziness and went back to his Houston routine: playing badly enough to force management to trade him to his new desired destination of Philadelphia.
Just before the February trade deadline, Nets management caved in to both knuckleheads. They allowed Kyrie to at least play in the away games without getting vaxed, and they agreed to trade Harden to Philadelphia for Ben Simmons – the second leading head case in the entire league behind Kyrie.
The ultra-talented Simmons was just what the Nets needed: a 6-foot-10 defender supreme who could lock down anyone from a center to a point guard, and a great rebounder and playmaker to boot. Of course, he is a terrible shooter, but that shouldn’t be a problem as long as Kyrie and KD were on the court with him. They typically take most of the shots anyway.
One little problem: Simmons had not played a single minute all season because he claimed to be suffering from mental problems that prevented him from taking the court.
Bottom line: the Nets traded one screwball in Harden for an even bigger head case in Simmons. But at least Harden was playing, sometimes even decently. Simmons was a ghost, a mirage, a recurring nightmare for a team that had legit championship hopes.
Nash tried to tamp down expectations by saying he didn’t know when Simmons would be ready to play — but certainly he would take the court before the playoffs started to work off the rust from his year off.
Near the end of the season New York lifted its vaccine mandate and Kyrie was finally able to play a full schedule. Naturally, he soon got hurt and had to sit out a bunch of games, which happens every year with him.
As the playoffs approached, excitement built for Simmons’ debut on the court, but Nash chose not to feed the expectations. He could see what was happening: Simmons was too mentally unstable to actually play after missing a full year of action.
But the public and the media kept playing the “Where’s Ben” game right up to the very end, with Simmons himself telling teammates he expected to make his return to action in game 3 or game 4.
It never happened, of course, but Nash still had to answer the same questions every day about Simmons’ injury status. It all culminated in game 4, when Simmons was supposed to make his return and shut down Celtics star Jayson Tatum, who had been killing the Nets all series.
This time Simmons didn’t even show up on the bench. He simply disappeared, and Nash had to tell the press that Simmons’ back was acting up and that was why he couldn’t play.
Nash surely knew better, but he was a good soldier and took one for the team.
After the first-round sweep, Kyrie told the press that the Nets lost because the team “never had a chance to jell.” He never once acknowledged the primary reason for that was his prolonged and repeated absences over the vaccine issue.
Then he said he expected the Nets to win the title next year because “me and Kev and Joe and Sean” are going to manage the franchise better than it was managed this year. He was referring to owner Joe Tsai and GM Sean Marks. Omitting Nash from that group was widely seen as a major diss of Nash.
No wonder Durant said Nash deserved another year because he was “dealt a crazy hand.”
If you see Nash around MB this summer, give him a big hug.
He needs it.
Dodger Dog dilemma dodged – for now
Dodgers bad boy pitcher Trevor Bauer was suspended Friday for two years for violating Major League Baseball’s sexual assault and domestic violence policy while engaging in rough sex with at least three women that we know about.
Two years isn’t so bad, considering that Will Smith was suspended from the Oscars for 10 years for slapping Chris Rock.
I guess it’s all relative. Bauer’s despicable conduct was in the privacy of his own home. Smith’s violence was televised worldwide.
The big winners in Friday’s ruling by Commissioner Rob Manfred: the Dodgers themselves.
Unless Bauer wins his appeal to an independent arbitrator – very unlikely, but still theoretically possible – the Dodgers are off the hook for the $30 million they owe him this season and the $32 million they owe him for next season. The $36 million they paid him last season for two months’ work is gone with the wind.
Now maybe they can take that extra $62 million and go out and get themselves a starting pitcher who isn’t, you know, a sexual predator, a raging misogynist, an online troll, a right-wing conspiracy monger and an all-around obnoxious jerk.
There have to be a few of those types of major league pitchers available in a trade.
The ruling, which came almost a year after a San Diego woman first made her bombshell allegations of being punched, choked and strangled after meeting Bauer online and agreeing to come to his Pasadena home for sex, put an end to the long-running question of what would happen to Bauer.
But in the intervening year, public opinion shifted from total condemnation to mixed feelings of disgust and live-and-let-live tolerance. That’s because the District Attorney declined to file criminal charges against Bauer after a police investigation, and a judge ruled that the woman had been misleading in some of her testimony.
Additionally, Bauer’s lawyers released texts and emails which showed the woman asked for rough sex, even after the first nightmarish encounter, and invited herself to come over for another sexual encounter.
You would think the whole lurid, tawdry affair would have caused the Dodgers to cut all ties with Bauer long ago. But that has not happened, and as of Monday night they were still silent on the question of whether Bauer would ever play for them again.
If he were to win his appeal and get a reduced suspension or no suspension at all, he would have every legal right to walk back into the Dodgers clubhouse and report for work. Of course, the Dodgers would have every legal right to tell him thanks but no thanks, pay him his $64 million and wash their hands of the whole repulsive mess.
The Bauer ruling came just a couple of days before Clayton Kershaw set a new Dodgers record for total strikeouts with 2,700.
It’s long past time for the Dodgers – the team of Kershaw, Koufax, Drysdale, Sutton and Hershiser — to admit their mistake in ever signing Bauer and to pledge publicly that Bauer will never pitch for them again.
Every day that they wait is a shameful day for a proud franchise.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. Follow: @paulteetor. ER