Nash doesn’t owe Team Canada anything

Steve Nash hasn't played for Canada in a major tournament since 2003. (Marc Serota/Reuters)

Thursday was a very bad day for Canadian basketball, at least in the short run. The national team’s loss to Panama at the FIBA Americas tournament, coupled with some other outcomes, took Canada out of the running for one of the 12 spots in the 2012 Olympics. Leo Rautins, the coach of the national team and a Canada basketball legend, resigned after the game, saying a new voice would best serve the team.

It was inevitable once Canada’s long-shot bid ended that someone would criticize Steve Nash for refusing to play on the national team, something he has not done in a major competition since Olympic qualifying in 2003. Nash’s decision to let a promising young club fend for itself has been a simmering issue for months now, and Steve Buffery of the Toronto Sun blew it open in this column today:

I guess busting some moves at a hip-hop festival, goofing around with Biebs and pretending to be a pro soccer player was more important to Steve Nash than helping his country qualify for the 2012 London Olympics.

And:

The man was a social butterfly this summer, bouncing from one city to another, doing this, that and the other thing. But devoting a couple of weeks to the national team was apparently out of the question.

And:

It’s a real shame. If Canada had qualified for London, Nash would have been in his element. He has roots in the English capital and his favorite soccer team Tottenham Hotspur plays there. The Games would have been a wonderful swan song for Nash, whose Suns aren’t going to win the championship anytime soon.

I have no issue with Buffery’s opinion. He’s entitled to it, and a plurality of his readers (judging by the comments under the column and in my Twitter feed) seems to agree. And at least one other aging star, Jason Kidd, has repeatedly volunteered to play for his own national team, so it’s not unheard of for someone so old in NBA terms to spend a summer hooping around the world.

It’s the lack of context that bugs me here, and the notion that Nash owes something to anyone. Basketball players really only “owe” what they are contractually required to do. They are ultra-wealthy by regular standards, and some of them lead glamorous lives, but they remain employees with benefits, contracts, pensions and diminishing skills. The assumption underlying the cries of “they owe us!” is often that players are lucky to do what they do for a living (they are!), and that they should be willing as a result to make various sacrifices regular folks would never make. It is the kind of thinking that had the earliest NBA players stuck in a horrifically repressive labor regime, without pensions, fair wages or the ability to choose their employer. Even today, fans bristle when players exercise their power by switching teams, demanding a trade or bowing out of some obligation that isn’t really an obligation. A certain segment finds that kind of thing distasteful in a way it never would if a magazine writer changed jobs or a teacher opted against teaching summer school.

Nash made a choice. Don’t misunderstand: Playing for the national team isn’t a hot-button labor issue or a decision in which money is directly at stake. It is an honor a player should cherish. It falls in the same category as charitable work in that we’d expect players to do it out of good faith, even if nothing requires them to do so. But it’s still a choice, and Nash is far from the first player — or even the first high-profile Canadian player — to make that choice.

But we don’t even need to get into these high-concept freedom-of-choice issues here. This is Steve Nash! He played for Canadian national teams in almost every relevant tournament from 1991-2003! He carried Canada to the 2000 Olympics, where the point guard and a bunch of guys you don’t know beat a few powerhouses before losing to France in the quarterfinals. Nash wept openly after that game, declaring that he had let his country down. People wrote things like this about him then:

The national men’s team never would have gone as far as it did without its point guard. As Toronto small forward Rowan Barrett put it: “Steve was under a lot of pressure. He’s the leader. We live and die by Steve.”

Moreover, the kind of person Nash is — well-spoken and genuine — made him a player people in Canada could believe in, and by extension made the game something they could believe in. In the wake of Canada’s upset victory over Yugoslavia, and in the days leading up to the game against France, traffic on NBA.com/Canada doubled.

He nearly brought another undermanned team back to the 2004 games, and of course won back-to-back NBA MVPs. Steve Nash is Canadian basketball.

You just can’t have this debate without mentioning this context, even if it might be common knowledge among Canadian readers. You can’t have this debate without mentioning that Nash declared more than a half-decade ago that he’d never play for Team Canada again after it dismissed Jay Triano, Nash’s friend, as head coach. (Hat tip to Tas Melas for reminding me of this today.)

And you certainly can’t have this debate without mentioning age and health problems, issues Buffery addresses only indirectly by pointing out that other Canadian players fought through injuries, and that an extended lockout might give Nash more time than usual to rest.

That’s not enough. Nash is 37 and has been dealing with a bad back for years. He suffered from pelvic instability last season, and it would have cost a lot of money to insure the $11.7 million remaining on his contract. And note: A 37-year-old player is not the same thing as a 33-year-old player (i.e. Kobe Bryant, dying for an Olympic spot). The latter are common; the former are rare. Here is the complete list of players in the last 30 years who have logged at least 1,000 minutes and put up a league-average Player Efficiency Rating in any season in which they were 37 or older.

There are a total of 20 players on this list — a mere 20 guys who have pulled this off since the NBA instituted the three-point shot in the 1979-80 season. Only eight of those 20 were guards, and only four of those were even nominally point guards. Only two of those point guard types – John Stockton and Sam Cassell — accomplished the 1,000 minutes/15.0 PER feat more than once after age 37.

In other words: Nash is ancient by NBA standards. Not just old, but ancient. And if the one remaining goal he cares most about is winning an NBA title, then he is entitled to preserve his body in pursuit of that goal. It’s easy to say the Suns will never win a title, as Buffery argues, but a ho-hum Phoenix team nearly made the Finals two seasons ago, and Nash, under an expiring contract next season, will draw interest on the trade market. After that, he’ll draw interest on the free-agent market, and he could place himself on the contender of his choice if he’s willing to play for the league’s minimum salary.

Again: Buffery and Nash’s other critics are entitled to their opinion. It’s disappointing, as a fan, that Canada’s best player and perhaps the greatest shooter in NBA history was not on hand to scrap for another Olympic berth. And if you want to play the patriotic duty card, go ahead. Just acknowledge the complexity of the situation.