Brooklyn’s highly coveted sharpshooter made one of his first public appearances of the offseason last week beside Steve Nash. Remember that guy?
A current (for now) and old Brooklyn Net spent some time last week chopping it up on The Young Man and The Three podcast, formerly known as the The Old Man and the Three w/ JJ Redick.
Cam Johnson, now a month and three days removed from NBA action, joined Steve Nash, who’s almost three years removed from his ambivalent tenure as head coach of the Brooklyn Nets. It was Johnson’s fourth appearance on the show. Nash is a bit newer to the mic, but seems to have found a taste for it, having recently stepped up to fill Redick’s role in the Mind the Game podcast with LeBron James. Redick, becoming a different kind of a teammate to James, had to leave the show for obvious reasons last summer.
While Johnson and Nash touched on things like the media’s evolution, the short-lived competition between Nikola Jokić and Jusuf Nurkić, and even the interior decor of Johnson’s Scottsdale apartment, much of the conversation centered around the NBA playoffs.
About a third of the way into the episode, Johnson asked Nash about the unique dual perspective he has having both coached and played point guard in the NBA playoffs. Nash assumedly referenced his time as a player development consultant with the Golden State Warriors. When answering, he mentioned Nick Nurse’s Toronto Raptors at one point. He never faced Nurse or the Raps in the postseason with Brooklyn but did in the 2019 NBA Finals.
“Some teams are just able to read and react,” said Nash. “Like, you think of Nick Nurse’s Raptors, like defensively, it was chaotic. They were in the gaps, flying people off the line, but they were so good at reading.”
Whether you’re a real hoop head or just still trying to wrap your around the 2021 Milwaukee Bucks series, you probably had hoped for Nash to lean into his most notable series as a head coach. Nonetheless, he did ultimately provide some general intel which seemed linked to Brooklyn, at least gently, specifically the 2021-22 team which the Boston Celtics swept out of the postseason.
“We always talk about adjustments, but a lot of adjustments don’t work,” Nash said. “Just because you make an adjustment doesn’t mean it works, right? So I think there’s a, ‘Let’s be ourselves. Let’s be ourselves better.’ And then there’s sometimes a blank, ‘Okay, we got to change — and what is my team capable of changing?’ Sometimes that’s between games, but sometimes that’s in game.”
“So as a player and a coach, there’s this kind of dichotomy or pendulum between ‘We have to be really good at what we do,’ and how many adjustments is our team capable of making effectively, and what happens when they don’t work?… At the end of a lot of series, we have a game or two, we try to play our game plan better, someone blinks, an adjustment could work, the other team adjusts back, all the adjustments are made, and then it becomes a dogfight. Who wants it more? Who’s more physical? Who’s not going to take plays off? Who’s able to stay focused? Who’s able to be efficient? It comes back to almost like we’re just playing in the park.”
That we were, now almost exactly four years ago. Don’t actually watch this unless you want your whole evening ruined.
“I can guarantee you, every NBA coach has things they’d like to do and say, ‘I can’t do that because we’re not capable, or player X can’t do it, or player X won’t do it, right?’,” Nash later said. “So the media’s like, why don’t they blitz? Every NBA staff has literally thought about the whole thing and when they’re not doing something, they’re usually, 99% of the time, a really good reason.”
The Nets sure had their fair share of personnel limitations during that second playoff run with Nash at the helm. But beyond that, your guess is as good as mine in trying to attribute that bit about potential players refusing to make adjustments to anyone on the Nets from 2020-2022.
Doing so isn’t a very productive exercise right now. We don’t even know if Nash was still touching on his own playoff coaching experience by that point. But hey, what else is there to do before May 12th?
Not long after, Johnson jumped in. He instead directly cited his playoff experience in Brooklyn, if you can even call those forgettable four games vs Philly in 2023 that.
“I had a series in Brooklyn against Embiid that’s a very similar type of situation,” he said. “It’s like, there’s so much you can do, and we went full tilt into hitting the entire game, trapping the entire game. But the result is, [Tyrese] Maxey’s teeing off 12 wide open threes a game. So the adjustment there becomes, in what scenarios do we blitz, are we blitzing at the top of the key, are we getting them on the elbows, only when he breaks the 3-point line?”
Outside of a shoutout to Dennis Schröder for being a teammate “always going to have your back,” the conversation’s already loose ties to the Nets were essentially severed after that point, as Nash and Johnson went on to discuss each ongoing playoff series.
While Brooklyn indeed wasn’t the main thing discussed by Johnson and Nash (understandably, might I add), this shared dialogue between two rather consequential Nets, forever tied to the team’s lore — but never overlapped — was mesmerizing, to say the least. Frankly, just the shot of them sitting together was too.
And if you want a real blast from the past, check out this episode I happened to stumble across on Young Man’s channel page. Who better to talk about the future of the Brooklyn Nets than Blake Griffin in 2021, right? Oh Blake, if only you knew what would soon befall you. If only we all did.