The NBA's biggest early-season regrets | Open Floor: SI's NBA Show
Ben Golliver and Michael Pina look back on the first quarter of the NBA season to investigate which teams are having the biggest regrets after six weeks of basketball. Would the Boston Celtics have found a way to keep Gordon Hayward? Would any team trade for Russell Westbrook? How should the Washington Wizards wiggle out of their current predicament with Bradley Beal? Did the Brooklyn Nets make the right hire with Steve Nash? Should the Detroit Pistons have scrapped their entire strategy? Did Denver need to back up the Brinks truck for Jerami Grant? How many teams screwed up by passing on Tyrese Haliburton? Should the Atlanta Hawks have just paid John Collins? Was there anything that Luka Doncic's Dallas Mavericks could have done differently to prevent their slow start? What about the wayward Timberwolves?
The following transcript is an excerpt from The Open Floor Podcast. Listen to the full episode on podcast players everywhere or on SI.com.
Ben Golliver: You can't blow a seven point lead to the Washington Wizards, a team that has barely even played this season and has some of the most damaging individual players in the league. It's just a roster full of regrets. If we're talking regrets right now, this whole roster is regrettable and you drop that game, come on.
Michael Pina: I think the biggest difference between the Golden State Warriors with Kerr and these Nets is that those Golden State Warriors had a year under Mark Jackson or a couple of years under Mark Jackson, where they went to the playoffs together, they felt pain together, they grew together. Here we're throwing Kyrie, KD and Harden now just against a wall and kind of seeing what happens. And you watch defensively they have no core belief system.
It's like when Jeff Green is at the five or even when Perry is at the five, they just switch everything and it doesn't matter what the mismatches are, or who that puts Kyrie Irving on, or what's going on. And sometimes even when D.J. is at the five, Kyrie will want to switch a pick and roll with DeAndre Jordan. And it's like, why would you do that? It makes absolutely no sense. And it just makes you wonder, what is Steve Nash even preaching that this would be a possibility or something that Kyrie can just feel he can freelance and do. It does also remind me of when we did an episode before the season began about coaches on the hot seat potentially.
And I brought up Steve Nash as a possibility because I thought that there would be a lot of expectations. Obviously championship expectations, you got to win now. And he had just relative question marks compared to some of the other names out there. And I'm not saying that he's going to get fired or anything. That feels a very hot take and very talk radio to talk about that right now. But he's not necessarily part of helping them get towards where they want to go at this juncture. Is that fair? I mean, I'm talking to you. I know you think that's fair.
Golliver: Yeah well, couple of thoughts. First of all, you'll notice I'm not even mentioning the defense because it's so disastrous. And that was not even supposed to be his purview. So I'm just giving him a complete pass for one of the worst modern defenses we've ever seen. I'm just giving a pass. I'm just nit picking the things that I think he should be good at because of who he was as a player, and who we thought he was as a thinker.
Steve Nash should be able to draw up a killer inbounds play just off the drop. There should be no problem whatsoever. He should understand intuitively, here's the guys we need to get the basketball to in these situations. Here's how we're going to do it, because he spent his life doing that for years and years and years, at an extraordinarily high level and thinking the game at a level most people could never think the game at. So that's what's confusing to me, I don't understand why it's not translating and he's not having some level of impact in these situations.
Despite all of this, the biggest fairness to Steve Nash is this; despite those blown games, despite the lack of attentiveness in some of these late game situations, Brooklyn is still the two seed in the Eastern Conference at 13-9. Their true record should be something like 18-4, you know something like that. And OK, what's really the difference there? I mean, you can kind of chalk that up to like, hey, we're figuring it out, we're going to go forward and eventually we're going to play better in those situations, so we're going to be fine. So I'm not sure we're ready to have the hot seat talk with Steve Nash. I just think he is going to regret some of the stuff that's happened to this point. And if it continues, then we're not too far away from some of those other darker conversations.
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