What Steve Nash's Hiring Says About the Evolving Golden State Warriors Culture
The real value in Steve Nash's partnership with the Golden State Warriors is more symbolic than practical, but don't make the mistake of assuming that detracts from its importance.
Chances are Nash won't be involved in the day-in-day-out grind—a possibility first reported by ESPN.com's Marc Stein and later confirmed in a team release. Intriguing as it is to imagine the two-time MVP breaking down film and spending hours imparting subtle tricks to Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Harrison Barnes, that's probably not how things will play out.
Warriors head coach Steve Kerr told Tim Kawakami of the San Jose Mercury News:
"And I think (Nash is) at the point… I know I always felt… as far as retirement, you really need your freedom. You have to be able to get away and do what you want and not live on a schedule. And we want to give him the opportunity to make an impact with our team, but… have his freedom as well. I think assuming it all pans out, this will be the best way for that to happen, where he can be very flexible with his schedule and yet still be a part of things.
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Nash doesn't live in the Bay Area. Throughout his ultimately failed comeback attempt with the Los Angeles Lakers, he remained committed to playing for no other team because his family had settled in L.A. and he didn't want to uproot them again.
From the sound of it, the Warriors won't ask him to.
Besides, it's not really possible for Nash to make a team that won 67 games while posting the eighth-highest average margin of victory in league history much better. Curry is already the MVP, the team is already elite on both ends and the coaching staff is already populated by an embarrassment of sharp minds.
It's hard to fathom how this group could significantly improve.
The Warriors' Idea Factory Gets an Upgrade
Even if his influence is most likely to be of a pop-in-and-chat variety, Nash is still immensely valuable to the Warriors because of what his acquisition stands for. It proves the Warriors aren't satisfied by one year of success, that no avenue for improvement will ever go unexplored and that their pursuit of good ideas will never be limited by pedestrian ambition.
They've built a collection of people and a top-down culture that now allows them to go from rich to richer.
Nash wouldn't be involved if not for the presence of Kerr, assistant Bruce Fraser or team president Rick Welts—all of whom formed strong bonds with Nash during their shared days with the Phoenix Suns, and all of whom have brought the very best ideas from those Suns teams to the Bay.
You might say snaring that Nash is more about a very specific relationship between men with shared history, and it's hard to discount the power of that bond—especially with Kerr admitting to Kawakami that the "Phoenix connections were really important."
But it's about something else, too.
Specifically, it's a result of the organizational mandate Kerr conveyed after the Warriors' Game 4 win in the NBA Finals—a victory earned through a strategic tweak suggested by Kerr's 28-year-old personal assistant Nick U'Ren.
"I don't care where an idea comes from," Kerr told reporters. "I've taken ideas from our players during the games when they make suggestions, our scouts. Doesn't matter where the idea comes from. If it's a good one, then we'll use it."
Even if Nash's actual degree of involvement remains casual, he's bound to have ideas worth considering. And the Warriors' egalitarian setup must have been appealing to him. He knows that even as something of a figurehead, he'll be listened to.
It's a rule now that whenever discussing how good things are with the Warriors, you have to mention how bad they were before. But it's particularly relevant to the Nash issue, so here goes.
Golden State's winning percentage in the 20 seasons preceding its 2014-15 title was the third-worst in the NBA during that span. And there was recent ugliness, too.
Remember that Grantland's Zach Lowe reported that former head coach Mark Jackson presided over a divided locker room of his own making: "When Ezeli was injured last season, Jackson and his staff told the healthy players that Ezeli was cheering against them—so that he would look good, according to several team sources. Players confronted Ezeli in a meeting, and he wept at the accusation—which he denied."
Nash, Captain Chemistry, a man who high-fived his Suns teammates an average of 239 times per game in 2010 (seriously), isn't coming within a country mile of that kind of team. But he's happy to cozy up with this one.
Meaningful Coolness
The Warriors have become a Nash-friendly environment in basically one year's time. And everything we've seen indicates that they plan to stay that way.
Golden State is meaningfully cool now. Not the Milwaukee Bucks' "they're young, rangy and weird" cool. Not the Houston Rockets' "they only shoot threes and it kind of works" cool.
Meaningfully cool. The kind of cool that stems from cutting-edge thinking on all fronts. The kind of cool that has a brand new San Francisco arena coming soon. The kind that has an MVP every scrawny kid on the playground can relate to. The kind that plays 6'6" forwards at center in the Finals. The kind that overhauls a training staff that kept a once-brittle team remarkably healthy because there were new frontiers of sport science to explore, and an Australian named Lachland Penfold was the man to explore them.
The kind that pulls Nash out of retirement and away from other suitors (the Dallas Mavericks and Cleveland Cavaliers made overtures too) and intra-division rivals (he'd been working with the younger Lakers guards last season).
And if the Warriors are now functional enough, successful enough and cool enough to snare him, who can't they go out and get?
Stats courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com.
Follow Grant Hughes on Twitter @gt_hughes.
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