Although Steve Nash has a Ph.D. in the pick-and-roll, he's spending this month as a freshman in Princeton.
The Princeton offence, that is. After 16 seasons and two MVP awards, the Los Angeles Lakers' new point guard is learning a new way to play.
The Lakers are incorporating major elements of the sophisticated ball-movement schemes collectively known as the Princeton offence into their game plan this fall, and Nash is largely in charge of making sure it works fluidly.
Along with new teammates and a new city, it all adds up to a busy October for the sharpshooting playmaker from Victoria who's not coasting on his credentials as one of the greatest pick-and-roll artists of his generation.
"It's going to be a big transition for me, but one I'm excited to take on and be open-minded about," Nash said. "I think that the beauty of this team is that we have a lot of guys that can make the defence pay. If we play together, and we space the floor, and we read and react, we can be a difficult team to cover."
Their new offence will get its first test Sunday night in Fresno with a pre-season game against Golden State.
Eddie Jordan, the veteran coach who joined Mike Brown's staff as an assistant last month, is working with Nash to make it happen. Jordan is watching over every offensive drill in the first few days of training camp, consulting frequently with Nash and Kobe Bryant while correcting missteps by Pau Gasol, Metta World Peace and Dwight Howard.
"I don't think it's something that we'll really have to struggle through," Bryant said. "It's a pretty seamless transition. ... I kind of relate it to the first year that Phil [Jackson] came here and put in the triangle offence. You had a lot of players that had high basketball IQ, and we just picked it up right away."
The Princeton plan has similarities to the triangle offence, particularly in the read-and-react mentality necessary to make it work. Triangle veterans Bryant and Gasol already recognize much of what they're supposed to do, and every-body has played against the offence before.
Brown realizes he's taking a risk by installing the Lakers' third new offence in three years, but believes they have the veteran personnel to make it work.
"There's going to be some aspects of what we did last year involved in the offence," Brown said. "But there's going to be some Princeton things that Steve Nash will have the ability to go to, with certain ball movement, or a pass, or a player movement, or a hand signal. We feel like all the pieces of it really flow."
The Lakers' offence stagnated for long stretches of last season, with the club's scoring settling in the middle of the NBA pack after declining more than four points per game from Jackson's final year. Los Angeles even went 13 consecutive games in the middle of the year without scoring more than 100 points, setting a new nadir for the franchise that once defined Showtime basketball.
