Steve Nash Won

NASSAU, BAHAMAS – I’ve had the misfortune of witnessing Kyrie Irving go full Kyrie up close and in person. 

In the summer of 2014, I played in a summer camp celebrity game. I’m no celebrity, but I’m tall, I used to work at the camp when I was in college, and I was just good enough at basketball that things wouldn’t look terrible with me out there. The featured Celebrity NBA player in that game? 

Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets. 

In these things, the celebrity NBA players go up against camp instructors. Usually, they’re college basketball players like I was when I worked there, and some are PE teachers picking up some extra money in the summer, but this year, the instructors were professional basketball players who were home on vacation from Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.

Kyrie was unstoppable, slicing and dicing through these guys, scoring at will at every level, just like he did and still does to NBA players. But there’s a special kind of pride in people who get paid to play sports, an attitude that can best describe hunger.

These guys were dogs and Kyrie was in a dogfight when he was expecting an easy exhibition game. They took everything Kyrie gave them and gave it right back to him that night in Nassau.

Then Kyrie did one of the most dumbfounding things I’d ever see someone do in a basketball game with refs; in front of children as young as four, happy that they get to see Kyrie in real life, in front of their parents, sponsors and staff who had worked their behinds off to get him in The Bahamas, in front of these kids.

He did this in front of sponsors who chipped in to keep the camp affordable so that this night can even happen.

He took his backpack and stormed off the court, leaving everyone in the fully-packed Kendall G.L. Isaacs Gymnasium completely aghast. 

At the time, I knew Kyrie as the quiet, wholesome kid who grew up with the pain of losing his mom at five and almost losing his dad in the September 11 attacks. I would come to find out that Kyrie wasn’t acting like a weirdo, he IS a weirdo.

First came the flat earth nonsense, then his back-to-back meltdowns in Cleveland then Boston, then a whole host of anti-vax, anti-science COVID nonsense including an incident where he did his best smallpox blanket impersonation and went to a Native American reservation unvaccinated with no mask on.

He also missed a ton of games because of his refusal to get vaccinated. His latest debacle involves a host of goofy, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that he’s standing firm in, guaranteeing this will be his last year in the NBA. 

Until today, former Brooklyn Nets coach Steve Nash had to find a way to relate to this man enough to get him to play effectively and win games. 

A man who said, that he didn’t really see Nash as the coach.

Today, Nash is no longer the coach of the Brooklyn Nets. It was reported that he and the Nets parted ways, clearing the way for them to sign Ime Udoka, who is currently on suspension from the Boston Celtics after an inappropriate workplace romance, because the Nets will never attract someone who can’t turn up a couple of scandals if you googled them.

Today, Steve Nash doesn’t have to live with the unrelenting YouTube philosophizing insanity that is Kyrie Irving. That’s Ime Udoka’s job now and maybe it is better suited to a guy who fought a whole stadium full of people in Algeria.

Steve Nash is a hall-of-famer with a reported net worth of $100m, and now he can go home and enjoy his copious wealth without having to hear about the plight of the Asiatic Black man, or how the earth being flat as been indisputably proven, or how black were the real Jewish people.

Steve Nash doesn’t have to deal with Kyrie Irving ever again in his life.

Steve Nash is free. 

Steve Nash won.