By Tom Scharpling, Hoop Magazine, June 2002

Steve Nash looks tired.

It's early February, and the Dallas Mavericks have arrived in the Garden State for a midseason matchup against the Nets. Tipoff is less than an hour away. In the visitors' locker room, Nash wearily leans forward on the hardwood slab that passes for a bench, deliberately lacing up his kicks. He's about to play his third game in four days, and it shows.

Steve Nash is the first Canadian to be selected as an NBA All-Star. Glenn James NBAE/Getty Images

Steve Nash looks very tired.

A mere 20 hours ago, the Mavs were in Indiana, squeaking out a thrilling double-overtime victory over the Pacers. Nash did his part, chipping in 25 points and 10 assists over 45 minutes of breakneck action. Now he's got to lead a depleted Dallas squad – only nine guys are suiting up tonight – in a road game against the best team in the East. A game in which he'll be matched up against former mentor Jason Kidd, who is routinely showered with chants of "MVP" from the Jersey homers.

This could be a long night for Steve Nash.

But as the Mavs burst out of the tunnel for pregame warm-ups, Steve Nash comes alive. The six-year vet has energy to spare, expending more juice on the layup line than some players burn during an entire game. Watching him cut back and forth, excitedly spring up and down, shimmy and shake himself up to speed, a simple fact becomes crystal clear: Once Steve Nash is on the floor, he's always in motion. "Yeah, everytime I play I have to bring that energy," the 6-3, 195-pound guard agrees. "It's one of the things that I count on night-in and night-out. There's no doubt in my mind that if I'm out there, I'm playing as hard as I possibly can."

Or as Mavericks assistant coach Donn Nelson puts it, "He moves all the time. It's what his game is based on in a lot of ways. If you fall asleep on him for a second – just one split second – you're going to pay the price."

Come game time, Nash makes the Nets pay the price again and again. Motoring up the floor as hard as his body will allow, those trademark locks flapping behind him, he rams the rock into the teeth of the defense. Once he gets deep into the paint, the zone collapsing in on him, he is truly at home. His options are limitless: behind-the-back passes to a driving Michael Finley, no-look dishes to Dirk Nowitzki on the curl, shovel kick-outs to Nick Van Exel from waaay outside.

And Nash isn't shy about calling his own number anymore, something that he hesitated to do in seasons past. "It wasn't my nature to be really aggressive [on offense]," Nash states. "I'd much rather be getting my teammates the ball."

Sound philosophy for a point guard – keep the gunners well-fed, and harmony will follow. But when you've got the ability to fill it up from any spot south of the 26-foot mark, selflessness ultimately shortchanges the team. Mavericks head coach Don Nelson sat Nash down during the '99-00 campaign and told him to start pulling the trigger or possibly face some pine time. "It wasn't an easy meeting. It wasn't a fun meeting," Nelson said at the time. "There wasn't a lack of effort on his part – it was just his mentality. Here's a guy who's got a gift for shooting the basketball, and I told him that by not using it, he was taking away one-third of his skills."

The new-look Nash positively rips with confidence on O. Whether he's drilling a mid-range fadeaway bullet J or hoisting that improbable floating scoop shot as he careens into photographer row, it's always thrilling. "The guy has the most amazing body control of any human being I have ever seen," gushes Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. "Steve can contort his body like a magician to put the ball up off the glass or over a shot blocker. He's like a walking geometry class!"

Nash has steadily elevated his average from an unspectacular 7.9 points per outing in ’98-99 – his first year in Big D – to his current 19.4 a game, second on the team behind Nowitzki.

Yet as dominant as Nash is in so many different ways, his game manages to defy categorization. There are flashes of timelessness, echoes of past greats reverberating through his play. Finley says that Nash is "just like John Stockton, but with Mark Price's shot." Donn Nelson sees a lot of [John] Havlicek: "It has to do with the way [Nash] moves out there, the way he reacts without the ball."

Then there's the now. The young player growing exponentially, not revealing where his ceiling is, where he'll finally top out. Each highlight is like a firework lighting the sky with brilliance for a single moment. If you missed it, it's gone. But don't worry – there'll be another one along shortly.

And then there's the future. Nash is the man who's set to lead Dallas to the promised land for the first time in franchise history. After 63 games of the '01-02 season, Dallas owned a franchise-best 45-18 record and a position firmly atop the Midwest Division. The correlation between Nash's individual successes and the team's collective resurgence is indisputable. He's the motor that makes the team run. "As the point guard, I've got to be a leader out on the floor," Nash says. "And that means I've got to keep my teammates involved, keep them positive. All of those things are important, and they're my responsibility."

Nash wouldn't want it any other way; the guy thrives on challenges. "I've had to prove something my whole career," he states. "I've faced a lot of naysayers at different points in my career . . ." He breaks off with a polite smile, but filling in the blanks is easy: I've faced a lot of naysayers at different points in my career . . . and I've shut them all up. I'm one of the best point guards in the game today. I'm an All-Star. And I still haven't even shown you everything I've got.

But there's no need for Nash to shoot off like that – his game speaks volumes. So does Dallas assistant coach/director of player personnel Donn Nelson: "From the first time I saw him play, I knew he was a winner. You could just see the entire package was there – including the ability to take on the roadblocks in his path."

Steve Nash's long strange journey to the NBA started in, of all places, South Africa. Nash was born in Johannesburg, where his father played professional soccer. But his parents were dead-set against raising a child under apartheid, so the family packed up and moved to Canada, eventually landing in Victoria, BC.

This article originally was featured in the June 2002 issue of Hoop magazine.

Nash was an athlete from the get-go, excelling at soccer, lacrosse and hockey. "Playing all of those sports helped me become a better athlete overall," Nash recalls. "Soccer especially helped with my coordination and my balance. But all of them gave me a pretty good understanding about competition and being on a team."

It wasn't until he was 13 that Nash started balling, initially as a way to hang out with his basketball-loving friends. The Canadian kid started logging hours on the court, modeling his game after Isiah Thomas, watching and re-watching highlights on his VCR until he could recreate specific moves. "It was an exciting time for a kid to be growing up, watching all the great players, getting caught up in the whole Air Jordan craze. That was the stuff that really fueled me back then."

After earning MVP honors in a couple of AAA tournaments, Nash was ready for college ball. He waited for the scholarships to come pouring in . . . and got exactly one offer, from Santa Clara University. He accepted and wasted little time in making his mark. After half a season, head coach Dick Davey was forced to insert Nash into the starting five, a move that almost immediately paid dividends in the '93 NCAA tournament. During a matchup against Arizona, Nash scored six points in the final minute of play, leading his Broncos to the first-round upset.

"In my 25 years of coaching, I've never seen a player spend more time trying to make himself better," Coach Davey gushed to the Dallas Morning News. "He's one of those few players who would make more demands on himself than a coach would . . . Other players were embarrassed if they didn't work, and they got caught up in his enthusiasm."

Nash led Santa Clara to the NCAA tourney two more times, a feat that did not go unnoticed up in the pros. Donn Nelson, who worked as an assistant coach for Golden State and Phoenix during Nash's collegiate career was hip to the Nash's antics. "In addition to seeing [Steve] play some big games at Santa Clara, I also had the unfair advantage of watching him in the Pro Am leagues in San Francisco," Nelson recalls. "He would come up and do battle with guys like Timmy Hardaway, Jason Kidd and Gary Payton – it was obvious that he could cut it at the next level."

Upon leaving college as Santa Clara's third all-time leader in scoring and top all-time assists leader (1,689 points and 510 dimes respectively), the '96 NBA Draft awaited. Nelson, then an assistant with the Phoenix Suns, leaned on then-head coach Danny Ainge to select Nash with the 15th overall pick.

Because the Suns were log-jammed at the point – both Jason Kidd and Kevin Johnson were on the roster – Nash rode the bench, absorbing the pro game from two of the game's best. "I learned a lot about confidence from those guys," Nash recalls. "When to take over a game, not being afraid to take over a game. I felt comfortable being out on the floor, but the confidence wasn't where it is now." He ended his rookie campaign with a meager 3.3 points and 2.1 assists in 10.5 minutes a game.

By the end of his second season, Nash had proved that he was ready to take another step forward. His 9.1 points and 3.4 assists per 21.9 minutes a game were a model of efficiency, but Phoenix's embarrassment of backcourt riches gave no room for his skills to grow. Following the '98 draft, the Suns traded Nash to the Mavericks.

A bum foot hampered Nash's ability to run things in Dallas right away. "When he came to Dallas, his first year-and-a-half was difficult, because he wasn't healthy," Donn Nelson recounts. "And when an athlete's body isn’t right, everything goes awry. So Steve's shot took a hiatus." As Nash averaged an unspectacular 7.9 points on .374 field-goal shooting, the hometown abuse rained hard. After one particularly rough home game against the Rockets, Nash defiantly stuck to his guns. "I'll face [their boos] with a smile on my face, and I'll be a winner one of these days."

Prescient words indeed, because as soon as Nash's injury finally cleared up, his fortunes brightened. In his third season as a Maverick, he caught fire, putting up 15.6 points, 7.3 assists and 3.2 rebounds per contest in '00-01. Dallas also visited the postseason for the first time in 11 years, and they bounced back from an 0-2 deficit to eject the Jazz in the first round. They lost to the Spurs in the next round, but a message had been sent: The Dallas Mavericks were back, and Steve Nash was running things.

- - -

Mavs head coach Don Nelson holds his postgame press conference deep within the bowels of the Continental Airlines Arena. The Mavs held on through 44 minutes of nip-and-tuck basketball to finally break the game open for the 112-100 win against the Nets. Nellie mentions that, considering the circumstances under which Dallas was playing, he wouldn't have been too upset if the team had let this one get away. But they didn't, and now he's off to Philadelphia, where he'll coach the Western Conference team in the '02 All Star Game.

Back in the locker room, Nash sits in the exact same spot on the same wooden slab. Out on the floor, he had maintained his frantic pace over 41 minutes, notching 18 points and 12 assists. For the second time in two weeks he had outplayed Jason Kidd, with the Mavs winning the season series.

Steve's foot is submerged in a bucket of ice, and an Ace bandage presses a plastic bag full of cubes to his back. He's more ice machine than perpetual motion machine now.

"I barely had enough left in me," he says. "I feel very proud of the way we played tonight . . . especially with a back-to-back and a double-overtime game last night that was draining."

A half pause before Nash adds, "I feel good."

And after he slides his jacket over his aching torso, he leaves the locker room. He too is heading to Philly, where he will be an All-Star.