Lookout rest of the NBA, the Steve Nash and the Brooklyn Nets are on a quest for an NBA championship this season. No, that’s obviously not breaking news. However, the fact that the organization is looking to go through a culture change to achieve that goal might be. This was revealed at a virtual town hall event which included season-ticket holders.
“We are playing for a championship and we’re going to build accordingly,” said Nash. “We’re going to frame everything we do in the lens of ‘is this a championship characteristic?’ or ‘is this worth championship quality?’”
Those are pretty high hopes quite frankly. Especially when you consider how Nash doesn’t even have one game under his belt as a head coach (or as any kind of coach). Furthermore, the team’s superstar leaders, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, haven’t played one NBA regular season game on the same team.
Injuries were a major hurdle last season for the Nets to overcome.
Durant sat out the whole season rehabbing his torn Achilles from the 2019 NBA Finals. Kyrie played only 20 of 72 games as a result of a shoulder impingement and knee issues. This contributed to the Nets experiencing a lot of lineup changes throughout the course of the season. Pre injury, the two without a doubt are generational talents. Together, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be a very dominant duo to be reckoned with.
Nash also emphasized he won’t be one of those coaches to come in and change everything. This could work to that duo’s strengths as leaders of this squad.
“I definitely don’t wanna come in with too many hard-and-fast concepts and designs,” said Nash. “I’d much rather come in with principles with ideas that allow our players to collaborate with us and allow their personalities and the dynamic between them and the chemistry to have a role in how it evolves. People talk about the Phoenix teams I played on, and this sort of revolutionary tone of how it impacted the game, but truth be told, Mike D’Antoni’s brilliance in much of that was he allowed it to evolve instead of getting in the way.”
Time will tell if this will amount to an NBA Finals berth and raising that Larry O’Brien trophy. But they’re saying the right things with the objective being to continue moving in the right direction. With a couple of more role players, and health working on their side, the Nets’ bold aspirations can become reality.
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