tsherkin wrote:tihsad wrote:Hmm, I'd have to think about this. I disagree that Nash was a huge impact player his last couple years in Dallas. Impact player, yes. Underrated, for sure. I just don't see the pre-2005 evidence Nash was a top 10 all time point guard waiting to burst out, making it obvious Cuban bungled and Colangelo saw what no one else did. I'm happy to retract that if you or anyone else shows me the data. I read Ben's write up on 04' Nash being better than any version of Stockton, and I'm not buying it.
I don't know that I'd say that 04 Nash was better than any version of Stockton. He was good, but by his own admission, he had things he still needed to work on and develop, and which prompted him to change some things about his game when he went to Phoenix.
It's hard to look at Nash and seem that impact; I think most of us missed it, to be fair. Dallas didn't give him the freedom to do anything like what he did in Phoenix, so of course we weren't really seeing it. Too many iso guys keeping the ball out of his hands, for example. Antoine Walker sucking, for another. He was a 15/9 guy in the RS, but Adelman screwed with him a bit in the playoffs and that hurt, for sure.
I think the ability was there, but the opportunity was not the same thing.
Popping in here after my post. Let me just say I feel like both posts were good.
tihsad, I don't know if you know my rep as a Nash guy (tsherkin certainly does), but I'll put that out there as a bias you can calibrate against.
Hitting point by point:
1. Nash his whole career was a more aggressive player than Stockton was known for. Sometimes people don't believe this because they associate aggression with scoring, but of course you can also have aggressive movement and aggressive passing, and Nash was crazy on these fronts. A random thing people on this board may find no meaning in, but I find interesting, is how a player looks on his trading cards. Here are some cards from Nash's time before D'Antoni:
What you tend to see is just Nash doing all sorts of things that are extremely risky in the name of getting an advantage, and it's just not the sort of thing we get from most guys. Basically, well before Nash was considered an all-star, let alone an MVP, the photographers were feasting on the imagery of his playing style, and it was his playing style that made a) some in Phoenix say it was a mistake to trade him instead of Kidd, b) made the Colangelos want to bring him back as their franchise point guard, and c) inspired D'Antoni to adopt the style he did.
Doesn't mean that other point guards couldn't have necessarily done something similar, but this isn't a '04-05 SSOL thing, this was Nash looking different from anyone else in the NBA, and Nash looking like that is why Phoenix never stopped thinking about him after they first let him go. (We should note that Donnie Nelson was in Phoenix lobbying for Nash before the 1996 Draft, and Donnie was in Dallas when the Mavs traded for him, so both times the reason why Nash changed teams in his prime, it was because the franchise that coveted him had a front office that had worked with him close up.)
2. We need to keep in mind that while Nash didn't have the same impact before D'Antoni by RAPM, it wasn't because the offense wasn't great with him on the floor. Simply being a part of a great offense that's great with or without you shouldn't get you an MVP of course, but if the question is "Why wasn't the Dallas offense great with Nash?", it's a false premise. The Dallas offense with Nash was the best offense in the world, end of story.
Hence when we talk about Dallas not giving him the opportunity Phoenix later did, while it's true, we shouldn't get the impression that the Dallas offense was disappointing. That Dallas offense was more successful than any other offense anyone was watching at the time, and had you asked people how much better NBA offense could get, the reasonable answer would have been something only slightly better than Dallas...and not nearly as good as what Phoenix would become the following year.
So when looking at a guy who was the point guard for "just about the best offense possible" in the eyes of contemporaries, who then moves to a new team where they produced far better offense than that, I don't think the question should be "Why didn't Nash succeed earlier?" We shouldn't pretend Nash had MVP level impact before he did of course, but that's a different thing from being under the impression that what Nash was doing wasn't really working. What Nash was doing was working basically peak paradigm for the NBA at the time, and what changed the next year was the start of a paradigm shift that would change the NBA more so than anything in the history of the NBA post-Russell, so looking at the comparison between the two as a matter of a player not getting good enough, and then getting good enough, is the wrong lens. It'd be like asking why wasn't Einstein good at physics until he thought up special relativity.
3. Yup, particularly in '03-04, the Mavs just loaded up on offensive players at the expense of defense, and the result was more great offense for a team already basically at a ceiling for offense (with their strategy), and worse defense. I would maintain that the 2003 off-season was there the Mavs really blew it, because it was not unreasonable to think after '03-04 that the team as constructed didn't need Nash that badly, but had the team built more wisely around Dirk & Nash with what we now call 3 & D, they'd have been a considerably better offense with a considerably better defense, and Nash's impact signal would have been huge.
Of course, it's not like the decision not to retain Nash was about the Nelsons giving up on him - they were incredibly frustrated to lose him - but from an owner's perspective, the decision to not match the Suns' offer made sense given the context the Mavs had the prior season.
This gets into an interesting discussion about blame that I don't think we have all the information on. Whose decision was it to add Walker & Jamison to the Mavs? Completely believable that it was Mark Cuban, but there's also this reality with Don Nelson that he wasn't a visionary like D'Antoni looking to exploit specific basketball advantages (pace, space), he was a made scientist whose whole career seemed to be "Why don't we try this?". Why have Manute Bol playing Run TMC? Why not?
So when it seems like Nelson has the recipe for SSOL just before D'Antoni, and then he goes the other way, I don't necessarily think "Blame the owner". He's just got a track record of trying a bunch of things, some of them on the cusp of paradigm shifts, but as often as not moving away from the paradigm shift without showing an indication that he understood its success.
4. Last on this part I'll just co-sign t's statement of "I think the ability was there, but the opportunity was not the same thing."
I think we need to recognize in basketball scouting and star development that if you're not slotted in as a team's cornerstone, you probably won't reach your potential. Basketball scouts are generally very successful at recognizing outlier physical talents, and then teams are very successful in building around those talents, but if you're perceived as a tier down from that, it's very easy to never get your shot.
In the case of Nash, I don't believe for a second that Nash was "raw" coming out of college - and in fact were he truly raw, I don't think he ever plays in the NBA. Nash was a 4-year college player who stood out to scouts about as much as you could at a minor program, which got him invited to the pre-draft invitational stuff, and if was him outshining bigger draft prospects there that got him drafted in the 1st round...only be drafted by a team that would have Jason Kidd & Kevin Johnson.
While there's no doubt that Nash's physical fitness would improve with his regiment over time in the NBA, all indicators were that he was an obsessive about his chances for the NBA while he was in college, just as he was obsessive about his chances for college when he was in high school. A similarly talented without that drive and vision never leaves Canada.
All this to say, whenever a player breaks out in the NBA later than immediately, I think we need to strongly consider whether that's about opportunity more than new ability. This is a cousin to the Most Improved Player award dilemma - did he actually improve, or did he just get more run? For an MIP award vote, I don't actually care that much whether it was definitively about a player's improvement, but from a question of being skeptical about the player prior to that point, it matters a great deal imho.
There's absolutely no question in the case of Nash that he had an opportunity in '04-05 that he'd never had in the NBA before, and with that opportunity, he shifted the paradigm.
tsherkin wrote:I don't understand the argument that the rule changes didn't matter? They were specifically designed to achieve higher scoring after Finals scores of 32 to 24 and fan's growing distaste with MMA style basketball. It's not frequently mentioned, but the embarrassing 04' Olympics played a part (I know, Iverson and Brown, but Duncan sucked as well). The changes (and we can go over the hand checking rules back to the 70s if you want, and more importantly how they were enforced) enabled Nash.
I mean, I think it's other things which made a much larger difference. Hand checking matters only so much to how he played. The up-tempo nature and spacing of the Phoenix game coupled to the opportunity to have full control over the offense was much, much more important than the handchecking situation. He wasn't DWade or any of those guys getting a significant boost in their draw rate because he wasn't a hella slasher in the same way.
So, speaking of the hand check rule emphasis, this is important, and it's something I think I have a rep for talking as if the emphasis didn't matter, which isn't true.
1. All of NBA offense benefitted from the emphasis policing hand checks for the '04-05 season, and Nash certainly benefitted more than some.
However:
2. That narrative of the time never acknowledged the broader NBA context where this was not something done for the first time in '04-05. Cracking down on abuses of hand checking is something that the NBA has done repeatedly since the '70s whenever it gets out of control. Whenever they do it, it helps the offense at first...and then gradually reverts back. What's actually going on?
What I would call a true "hand check" - simply touching the man you guard without applying force - is something nobody has a problem with, but the problem is that when you touch a guy, you have the opportunity to push or pull him too, and for all of NBA history, this has been against the rules for perimeter ballhandlers and shooters.
If we go back deep enough into basketball history into the "cage" era - which ended in the 1920s - it would have been different. At that time, pro basketball was played in a rope cage analogous to the walls of a hockey rink, and defenders threw themselves at offensive players in much the same way leading to rope burns for the "cagers" as a matter of course.
3. While in '04-05 it was plausible to talk about the hand check emphasis as the most important thing going on with Nash, 20 years on, it doesn't hold up, because we've since seen league-wide ORtgs skyrocket as hand check emphasis has waxed and waned. The NBA now is drastically different than it was at the turn of the millennium, and this really has nothing to do with hand check differences.
What's different, in a nutshell, is pace & space.
tsherkin wrote:I agree that Stockton would not replicate what Nash did in Phoenix, I also don't see Nash replicating Stockton in Utah (the 05' Dallas team had more that feel). Stockton was a very, very good PG defender. All metrics support it as do all the tales of his peers at the time (take that as you will). Nash was a poor defender even as a PG (not for lack of effort), and the Suns translated to RS success and PS failures (shout out to Robert Horry). PG defense isn't 5 defense, but when it's that bad it counts.
I think it's heavily overrated in terms of why Phoenix didn't go further. I think that their weakness in terms of size for rim protection and rebounding was of much greater concern, and how much most of the team relied on being spoon-fed as opposed to having another reliable creator who could move the ball well. All play finishers, basically.
Context, such as particulars of deployment, is so important to player performance and impact.
Stockton's defense is absolutely stronger than Nash's, and a reason to favor Stockton.
I'd also agree that neither guy should be expected to be able to replicate what the other did.
Re: Suns translated to RS success and PS failures. Agree with tsherkin that no it didn't, and this is at the heart of the confusion.
Had the Suns won a title, the pace & space paradigm shift goes faster hitting its top speed in the '00s rather than the '10s.
Those Suns only ever got "upset" by the eventual champion Spurs, and the stories behind those two upsets are complicated. People at the time used them as all the proof they needed to to suggest that the Suns' offense was a gimmick that couldn't hold up in the playoffs...but none of the detail evidence ever suggested this, and then of course in the 2010s, even the Spurs were playing like the Suns.
All this then to say, 20 years on, that there were false narratives that pre-paradigm thinkers grabbed on to to justify why they didn't have to change their basketball perspectives that have since been pretty clearly falsified by the data...but the story of the narrative continues to live on, because that's what narrative tends to do.
People 20 years ago would have been smarter about basketball if things had played out slightly differently, so let's make sure that those of us with the benefit of hindsight are not trapped by the blindness of talking heads past.
