Steve Nash‘s career probably didn’t end the way he imagined it would, i.e. riddled with injuries that prevented him from even setting foot on a basketball court let alone making an impact for his team. That wasn’t the plan when he left the Phoenix Suns in 2012 to join Dwight Howard and Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles. The idea was to assemble a super team of sorts and finally be able to legitimately contend for that elusive championship. But that wasn’t his destiny.
Instead, Nash was forced to finally hang up his sneakers this year and let history decide where he belongs in the pantheon of all-time greats. Even without that championship distinction, Nash is almost certainly a first-ballot Hall of Fame candidate. He won back-to-back regular season MVPs in 2005 and 2006, was an eight-time All-Star, and is third all-time in assists behind only Jason Kidd and John Stockton.
But his legacy extends even beyond that. He and former coach Mike D’Antoni helped shepherd in the pace-and-space era of the modern NBA with their seven-seconds-or-less Suns teams of the mid-2000s. Though the Hall of Fame induction ceremony is a long ways off, his former team announced via their website that they will be inducting him into the franchise’s own “Ring of Honor” on Oct. 30 during a game against the Portland Trail Blazers. He’ll join other Suns greats like Charles Barkley, Kevin Johnson, Paul Westphal, Tom Chambers, Dan Majerle, Jerry Colangelo, Connie Hawkins, and more.
Fair or not, we’ll always measure athletes’ legacies by their number of championships (or lackthereof), but Nash is also one of those rare players whose career accomplishments and lasting impact in many ways transcend that criteria.
(via Suns.com)
