How Steve Nash Shines in Basketball--and Business

Enlarge

Patrik Giardino

---

Related Content

related link

Steve Nash's Playbook

related link

Web Exclusive: Steve Nash: The NBA's Top Entrepreneur

related link

Web Exclusive: Baller Steve Nash Scores a Web Video Three-Pointer

Twelve seconds left in the season opener.

Phoenix Suns 107, Los Angeles Clippers 107.
Twelve seconds for Steve Nash to find a way to win.
The Phoenix coaches outline a plan. Suns' ball. Nash, the team's wily point guard, will let the clock nearly expire before executing a play. As Nash dribbles, Clippers point guard Baron Davis defends him closely. Guarding against the very play the Suns called. Guarding against Nash going right. Nash abandons the plan and darts left. Time to make up a new play. On the fly.

To watch Steve Nash is to observe someone uncannily at ease with change. Rapid change. Whenever possible, he plays on the run, starting a fast break rather than a set play, orchestrating a free-form attack. What sounds like a recipe for sloppy basketball proves highly effective in Nash's hands. When Nash signed with Phoenix as a free agent in 2004, he took over the NBA's riskiest and most unorthodox offense, one that required his team to get a shot off in seven seconds or less. And Nash soared. Already an all-star, he became more dangerous at hyperspeed, choreographing a thrilling dance of snap decisions and eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head passes. He is only the ninth player in NBA history to win consecutive league MVP awards.

No one better embodies the metabolism of our times, when industries, technologies, and careers are in constant flux. In leading Phoenix to the league's best record to start this season and, most likely, to a return to the play-offs, Nash demonstrates how to navigate uncertainty -- with flexibility, collaboration, and inventiveness. He has developed a gift for finding order in chaos. He adapts to new information, assesses the risks, and creates opportunities for him and his teammates to succeed. Nash improvises.

We all need to be improvisers now, to transition between the jobs we have and the backup plans we may need to pursue in the current economic crisis. Between the ways we're accustomed to working and the new habits shaped by Twitter, Facebook, and other new tech tools. Between the recession and the postrecession world.

Both on and off the court, Nash's exploits illuminate lessons about how to manage these transitions. The son of a professional soccer player, he didn't take up basketball until eighth grade, but then transformed himself into a top high-school player. At little-known Santa Clara University, in California, the only school to offer him a scholarship, he worked himself into a first-round NBA draft choice. He began as a bench player with an iffy back who later revamped his exercise regimen -- and his game -- to become a surefire Hall of Famer, the 38th best NBA player of all time, according to über-blogger Bill Simmons in The Book of Basketball. Nash was a camera-shy and endorsement-averse pro even as he became an all-star; he now pitches ad ideas to Nike and Vitaminwater and relishes cameos on Entourage and The Late Show with David Letterman.

Nash's future rides on his latest transition. He is 35 in a league where the average age is 27. So he's thinking a few steps ahead. He's becoming an entrepreneur, finding business outlets for his off-court creativity. "I hate to say it, because the clichés can get nauseating, but I try to keep the ball moving," he says of his burgeoning enterprises. "If you let things slow down, they lose momentum."

*****

Ten seconds to go.

Nash is still 25 feet from the basket. Scanning his options. He pivots. What to do next? Pass to Grant Hill on the wing? To Channing Frye near the basket? Take it himself?

When Nash reached the NBA in 1996, he had a plan for how he would handle life as a pro: He wouldn't pursue the spotlight. He relished his privacy and was uncomfortable with the attention.

After he made the all-star team in 2002 and helped turn the Dallas Mavericks into one of the league's top teams, Bill Sanders, CMO of BDA Sports, which represents Nash, wanted to build a brand around his budding star. In a league that celebrated one-on-one moves and showy acrobatic dunks, Nash, a very mortal 6-foot-3, was a fan favorite because he dazzled at a lower altitude with ball handling, passing wizardry, and team basketball. Nash listened to Sanders, and said what NBA players never say: I'll pass.

He was the anomaly, an inquisitive guy who was reading No Logo, a dense and provocative argument by fellow Canadian Naomi Klein, which describes how companies had devolved into global marketing machines at the expense of innovation. Nash didn't want to be a pitchman. "I felt there was an exploitation and manipulation going on," he says. The offers, whether endorsement deals or invitations to appear on The Tonight Show, were all a distraction from the discipline -- "tunnel vision," he calls it -- that had gotten him to the NBA and enabled him to thrive there. Sanders dubbed him the "reluctant icon." BDA Sports CEO Bill Duffy says, "There was a lot of John Lennon in him." (Nash's T-shirt at the 2003 All-Star Game, a month before the invasion of Iraq: "Shoot baskets, not people.")