Steve Nash speaks during induction ceremonies at the Basketball Hall of Fame, in Springfield, Mass., Sept. 7, 2018.Elise Amendola/The Associated Press
On Thursday morning, the Brooklyn Nets hired B.C.’s Steve Nash to be their next head coach.
This wasn’t a surprise so much as a bolt come down out of a clear sky. The former general manager of Canada’s national men’s basketball team has never coached, nor expressed any clear desire to do so.
Now he’ll try his luck with Brooklyn, an NBA franchise that projects more as a travelling soap opera than a basketball team.
Brooklyn features two enormous stars whose talent is roughly proximate to their egos – Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant. Both are prone to me-first-ism and the occasional public meltdown. They’re what you’d call a handful.
Were they not so good at their craft, you’d say they were the wrong people to build a team around. Which still means they are probably the wrong people to build a team around. But the Nets have money and these were the two best pieces they could buy. It’s now up to Nash to realize the investment.
Nash has undeniable bona fides – two-time NBA MVP, a Hall of Famer. The people defending the hire on Thursday tended to lean hard on his “smarts” and “intellect” – which is the way NBA insiders say “scrawny white guy.” The people who didn’t like it took issue with the fact that Nash is jumping the queue.
Both sides misunderstand why Nash got the job. This isn’t a basketball hire. This is a soccer hire. This is how the biggest clubs in Europe pick their coaches. And it’s got very little to do with coaching.
In soccer, you hire a coach with one thing in mind – how his name rings out. Is it the sort of name that makes people down in the pub say, “Him? Oh, he’s good.”
It’s even more important that players feel this way. They should be awed by the coach’s name. They should feel they would look like fools were they ever to speak ill of him or be seen disagreeing with him.
They should fear the coach, not in the old ‘if this guy hates me, he will ruin my life’ way, but in the new ‘if this guy doesn’t love me, it must mean I’m crap’ way.
These sorts of coaches are exceedingly hard to come by. Alex Ferguson of Manchester United was such a coach. Jurgen Klopp of Liverpool and Pep Guardiola of Manchester City are such coaches.
Nobody cares if Guardiola can properly position his men to defend free kicks. That’s not his job. He hires people to do the actual work of instruction.
Guardiola is there to corral a bunch of self-regarding bajillionaires who all think they are the biggest thing to hit Earth since the Chelyabinsk meteor. He is there to feed and water a string of thoroughbreds. Occasionally, one of them has to be sent off to the glue factory and that’s Guardiola’s job, too.
Guardiola was a very good player in his own right and just happened to be the Barcelona coach when a certain Lionel Messi was coming into his own. Plus, he looks fantastic strutting the touchline in a cashmere sweater. And that’s it. That’s how you build a legend.
Then you use the legend to bend other men to your will.
The three soccer examples referenced here didn’t just arrive on the scene looking three feet taller than their peers. They needed years (in Ferguson’s case, many years) to establish themselves.
That’s a big hassle for the people who run sports teams. Cultivate talent? Ugh. How much will that cost? Once you’ve done it – and there’s no guarantee you will – the guy up and leaves for a bigger team.
The Nets were already more like a soccer team than any other North American franchise. They are attempting to procure a title by buying top players. There’s no shame in it, but it’s not the fashionable thing.
The fashionable thing is tanking for a few seasons and hoping to get lucky in the draft. (Come to think of it, there’s a lot more shame in the fashionable thing.)
What this means is the Nets must win right now. They don’t have the luxury of giving Durant, Irving and the 10 serfs trailing in their wake time to get used to each other. This team must be good right away. And it will be, as long as Durant and Irving are not trying to kill the coach, their teammates, each other, or all three at once.
Maintaining that balance requires a charismatic figure in charge. One who gives off the strong scent of authority even alphas recognize.
The Nets tried to go the retail route with this. They reached out to the only current NBA coach who has that top-end Euro pedigree – San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich.
Is Popovich a great coach? On the one hand, he’s won five championships. On the other hand, I think I could have told Tim Duncan, “Go stand in the middle and be really good.”
Bottom line, it doesn’t matter whether Popovich is a great coach. What matters is that NBA players believe he is.
Brooklyn wanted Popovich so that when Durant comes into his office and announces, “I’ve decided I would like to take 70 shots a game,” Popovich can say, “No. Close the door on your way out.”
When retail didn’t work out, Brooklyn decided to try wholesale. That’s how Nash ended up with a four-year deal.
Is this fair? Well, is anything? People have begun to treat sports hiring like it’s casting a high-school play. Like everyone who worked on the lighting crew last year gets to play a lead this time.
Sports is not fair. That’s why we call it sports. Not everyone gets a chance, and not everyone who gets one deserves it.
Will Nash be a good coach? It hardly matters. He’s not there to teach Kyrie Irving anything. He’s there to make sure Irving is in the proper frame of mind to perform when it counts, whether that is via flattery or threats or wheedling or whatever it takes. He’s a father figure, a therapist, a best friend and – because some guys seem to like this once in a while – a worst enemy.
The only way to judge Nash is on his record. Once we’ve seen that, everyone will say they knew all along this was the best/worst idea ever.