Head coach Steve Nash of the Brooklyn Nets reacts during the first half against the Dallas Mavericks at Barclays Center on Oct. 27.Sarah Stier/Getty Images
On Tuesday, a predictable thing happened – Steve Nash “agreed to part ways” with the Brooklyn Nets.
Nash, who’d never coached before at any level, was brought in to do basketball whispering on three erratic stars. As experiments go, this one was Pop Rocks plus Pepsi.
The only thing that makes this remarkable is the inciting event. Nash survived a bunch of things – including a player insurrection – that would have done in most other coaches. He did that by sticking to a very tight script: be positive, place no blame, pretend to see the best outcome in every situation.
When he was asked to wade into a charged political debate, Nash tried the same script. He might as well have unpinned a hand grenade at the podium.
For the last week, the NBA has been trying to wrestle Nets guard Kyrie Irving into an apology. How has it done this? Mostly by hoping really hard.
Irving is a famous whack-a-doodle with a lot of paranoid opinions. He doesn’t like vaccines (“I’m not going to be used as a person in this agenda”). He may believe that if you sail far enough south, you will tip over into outer space (“Can you openly admit that you know the Earth is constitutionally round? … Like, I don’t know.”)
His latest ‘I’m just asking the question, bro’ moment involves a fringe documentary accused of promoting bigotry against Jews.
Irving sent out a link to the film over social media, then refused to discuss what he meant by doing that. He refused so hard that it was difficult to tell if he’d seen the movie he’d enraged everyone with.
Is Irving an anti-Semite? Impossible to say for sure. Irving is adept at saying a bunch of vaguely smart (but actually not) sounding things that don’t mean anything: “The claims of anti-Semitism and who are the original chosen people of God and we go into these religious conversations like it’s a big no-no. I don’t live my way like that.”
If the internet could talk, this is the sort of gobbledygook I imagine it saying.
In a meandering and combative press conference, Irving managed to avoid the sort of kill-shot quote that would allow the NBA to shut him down. So he was out there on Monday night, jawing with a group of fans in courtside seats wearing ‘Fight Antisemitism’ T-shirts.
Instead, it was left to Nash in his pregame comments to try and explain what Irving was talking about.
Arms folded, using his most serious voice, Nash did his best to project ‘elder statesman.’ It didn’t go well.
“There’s always an opportunity for us to grow and understand new perspectives. I think the organization is trying to take that stance where they’re going to communicate through this,” he said. “And try to all come out in a better position with more understanding and more empathy for every side of this debate and situation.”
Within that line of nonsense, you can pick out the sports-cliche beats Nash was trying to hit: “opportunity,” “grow,” “communicate,” “understanding,” “empathy.”
But the only bits any non-sports-fixated person hears are “new perspectives” and “every side.”
What new perspectives? Every side of what debate? What are the sides here? You write that paragraph down and it sounds like an invitation to argue whether or not anti-Semitism exists.
Let’s assume that Nash wasn’t doing that. That he was trying to sound leaderly in the banal way that sports executives are expected to, and inadvertently came off like he was defending Irving’s media picks.
This is what happens when sports people motivated by sports concerns feel they must speak authoritatively about real-world issues. They can’t do it.
It’s one thing for the Kareem Abdul-Jabbars of the world to talk politics. This, rather than winning games on the next East Coast road trip, is the fight they’ve chosen. They’ve taken the trouble to figure out what they’re talking about. You don’t have to agree with what they say, but you will agree they’re not just popping off because someone asked a question.
Unfortunately, everyone else in sports has also been thrown into the role of political commentator by current events, and most of them are bad at it.
The answer isn’t for more people in sports to educate themselves. Most don’t care to. The answer is to say less about things you either don’t understand or aren’t willing to talk about in plain English. I would rather someone say “I don’t know enough to answer that,” than go off on a snipe hunt for le mot juste about the war in Ukraine.
But every force in North American society is pushing sports in the opposite direction. This new emphasis on high-volume moralism runs directly against sports’ never-to-be-spoken-of No. 1 rule – there are no rules for the best players.
If Kyrie Irving played three minutes a night and made 800 grand, do you think he’d still be a Brooklyn Net? Would people be trying to gently coax him into saying he went on Amazon and got confused? Are you kidding me?
One of Nash’s several errors here was assuming he would receive the same protection as a 30-year-old, seven-time all-star who’s about to become a free agent. He doesn’t. For all his efforts on behalf of the Nets, Nash gets a professional bullet as a parting gift.
Having encouraged players to get political during work hours, it’s now on leagues to corral the ones that go rogue. You wanted them to talk more? They’re talking. Best of luck with that.
How teams deal with their Kyrie Irvings feels like sports’ next ethical crucible. Firing an owner is one thing. Throw a rock in south Florida and you’ll hit a superrich moron. But a stud quarterback or a No. 1 centre? Those are harder to come by.
Then it becomes the choice between practising what you preach and doing what’s good for business. Billion-dollar corporations have a fairly consistent track record when it comes to that sort of thing.
Trapped in the middle of this struggle are the future Nashes of the sports world. What lessons have they learned from this episode? It’s not to speak out more righteously. It’s to say less whenever possible. And whenever it’s not, to pray that you aren’t blamed for having no clue what you’re talking about.