3. Nash’s Phoenix Finale
On the night of Steve Nash’s final game with the Phoenix Suns, I wasn’t even covering the team as a journalist yet. I was just a college kid who went to Arizona State University and had a lot of homework that night.
But like many students from the the downtown Phoenix campus, I decided a long night of studying could wait and made the 10-minute trek to US Airways Center to witness what, at the time, “might” have been Nash’s last game with the Suns. As soon as we got there and saw how packed it was, however, we knew the truth deep down. This was his Phoenix finale.
It wasn’t a pretty game. The Spurs were resting their starters with their spot in the playoffs already secured, and Alvin Gentry played his bench players since Phoenix wasn’t in the playoff hunt. Nash only played 17 minutes in the game, and the Suns gave up a 20-10 run in the final five minutes to lose the game, 110-106.
But nobody cared about any of that. With the clock winding down in the fourth quarter and Nash sitting on the floor at the end of the bench, as he often did because of his back, the entire crowd at US Airways Center stood up and started chanting in unison: “WE WANT STEVE! WE WANT STEVE! WE WANT STEVE!”
When Gentry finally obliged with 3:57 left in the game, deafening cheers rained down in a way I haven’t heard at US Airways Center since. Not even Goran Dragic’s 40 points against the New Orleans Pelicans or Eric Bledsoe‘s near triple-double against the Oklahoma City Thunder came close to this.
It didn’t matter that Nash’s first play of the game was a turnover. It didn’t matter than Gentry subbed him back out a minute later. It didn’t even matter that the Suns lost to the Spurs’ third string in the end. For that one-minute curtain call, Suns fans got to thank their hero for all he had given them over the years.
Nash left that summer for the Los Angeles Lakers, and that definitely ruined a lot of Suns fans’ Fourth of Julys. But it didn’t diminish the moment of that packed US Airways Center, nor did it taint the goose bump-inducing memory of that massive crowd chanting, “WE WANT STEVE! WE WANT STEVE! WE WANT STEVE!”
Next: No. 2