Keller61 wrote:My question with Nash is how much of his success can be attributed to the system/coaching? He wasn't nearly as impactful before coming to Pheonix, and had been in the league 8 years before then. Not many players improve dramatically at age 30. Maybe Nash was just the perfect glove for D'Antoni's hand, so to speak, and not really a transcendent player who could elevate any team by his own talent.
Would a team like, say, this year's Thunder be better with Nash in place of Westbrook? I'm not sure.
"System/coaching?" When people refer to "system players", they typically mean it as a slam on the player stating credit should instead go to the coach. You putting those two words together to me says you're asking if that's would should be done here. I've been responding to this question - or realistically more often assertions along these lines - for a decade, so my apologies for sounding rant-y:
The term "system player" comes from college football. It came out the University of Houston in the early '90s because they had a coaching scheme that allowed various quarterbacks to put up huge numbers. At first, people didn't understand a scheme could do this, and as a result Andre Ware and David Klingler were top draft picks expected to be NFL stars, who it turned out didn't have that kind of talent at all. So the term was created as a warning: Don't draft this guy, the coaching scheme makes him look phenomenal, but really he's easily replaceable.
The term spread from there to various places, but in my experience it didn't become that widely used until Nash's first MVP season when people were looking for a way to express their skepticism that a player who had never been seen as an MVP level player before, could actually warrant the award. The term seemed a natural fit for them because one could say pretty reasonably that the Suns had a "system" and Nash's stature had some dependence on that system.
The problem with this assertion is that Nash actually had the opposite profile of a system player: He had traditional stats that didn't blow people's minds, and those championing him talked about his ability to lift his team and his irreplaceability. As such the criticism was about as misguided as one could possibly be as not only was it an incorrect label, those who used it were basically announcing to the world that if there actually were a system player of a star out there, they would be the one's who fell for his false impact.
And it's a decade later, and the same stuff is still happening. As are things like people saying that the Suns offense failed in the playoffs (it didn't) or that the Suns were a gimmick team (the whole league essentially plays like the Suns now, the Warriors played even faster and shoot more 3's with a team offense based entirely on a point guard). So yeah, I don't really expect it to ever end at this point, but it's amazing to me because these criticisms were either completely invalid as soon as they were uttered, or they were disproven not too long after that.
Anyway, the fundamental thing here is that it only makes sense to take credit away from a player and give it to the coach if the player is truly a system player, meaning far more replaceable for that coach than the stats indicate. Any other situation, the coach and the players should BOTH receive credit. D'Antoni deserves a ton of credit for his vision and his recognition of what Nash might be able to do, but Nash had to actually go out and do it.
What about the fact that Nash still has to be used a certain way to have that impact? Well, that's what lacking versatility means. It's a meaningful criticism, but it's far more benign than being a system player.
How would Nash do in OKC instead of Westbrook? Well, the big question in OKC is about how Westbrook & Durant will work together in the future. However in the past, Westbrook has been incredibly problematic with Durant. Here's a guy who is probably the most gifted off-ball scorer we've ever seen, and tons of possessions end up instead with Westbrook taking on the world for a low percentage shot. It's not a question of if Nash could do better with Durant's scoring talent, it's only a question of how much better he'd do with Durant. I'd venture to say: TONS. No one should forget what Durant did without Westbrook after all last year. Westbrook actually gets in Durant's way, Nash would actually make Durant look better, simple as that.
But as I say all this let's be clear: Westbrook making Durant look worse doesn't mean I'm saying the team would be better off without Westbrook. Westbrook still made the team better, there was simply high redundancy because Westbrook has massive portability issues. Fine to complain about them, but you're still better off with what Westbrook brings individually than with a run of the mill point guard.
Then there's the matter that if you're going to run a unipolar scheme like OKC is doing at the moment, there's no reason to think Nash would be better at that than Westbrook. Westbrook is doing absolutely everything for OKC, and while I can quibble about details, the bottom line is that their supporting talent is really damn depleted, and as such there's no reason to think, "You know what we really need? A passer."
