Why does Stevie Nash get a pass from Canucks?

(Disclaimer: I would never hate on Canada’s greatest basketball talent. I have nothing but love and respect for Steve Nash. He’s incredible — as a player and as a person. But there is something about his latest decision that bugs me.)

So … Steve Nash won’t be playing for Canada’s senior men’s national basketball team when it tries to qualify for the 2008 Olympics this summer. He won’t play in the Olympics if they happen to qualify, either. Probably, he’ll never play basketball for his country again.

And that’s okay. He’s getting a pass. He’s busted his ass for Canada in the past, does more than his share of outreach work and — thanks to his back-to-back MVP awards — is the greatest ambassador for the game this country has had since Naismith.

Still, it’s a good thing for Nash that he doesn’t play hockey.

If Steve Nash were a hockey player who, at age 33, was perhaps no longer a spring chicken but was otherwise in the prime of his athletic career (he’s on pace for a career high PPG average this season, and still leading the NBA in assists, of course), do you think he would get such an easy pass from Canadian fans when announcing he planned to skip the Olympics?

Not a chance. Imagine, two months before the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City … Mario Lemieux, Joe Sakic and Steve Yzerman (at the time 37, 33 and 36 years old respectively) call a press conference:

LEMIEUX: Good morning. We’ve come here today to announce that the three of us will not be playing for Team Canada in the upcoming Winter Olympics. For me, it is simply too much hockey. After returning to the NHL less than two years ago, I have been playing hockey non-stop, and a two-week break would really help my body to recover for the stretch drive. My back is not strong right now and I need all the rest I can get. I am sorry — but I just can’t do both.

SAKIC: While I may not be as old as Mario or Steve, I have been playing full NHL seasons, as well as frequent extended playoff runs, since 1988. The Colorado Avalanche have a shot at the Stanley Cup this year and I plan to lead them in the playoffs. I simply can’t risk my body — though I’ve been lucky enough to be healthy throughout my career — in an Olympic tournament at this point. I just can’t do both.

YZERMAN: I’m also nearing the end of my career, and while I may not have recovered from cancer like Mario courageously has, at this point I am basically playing on one good leg. The Detroit Red Wings’ management team has stacked our roster with hall-of-famers and our fans expect nothing less than the cup. It’s my job to bring it to them. At this point in my career, I just can’t do both.

Imagine, for one moment, the reaction of the average Canadian hockey fan to this press conference. Not pretty, right? Would that picture to the right have been taken in the weeks that followed? And if it hadn’t, who would have taken the blame? Would ridicule and scorn be sufficient? Or would we be talking drawing and quartering?

We takes our hockey seriously, y’all.

Yet it wouldn’t have been unreasonable at all for these three great and respected athletes to have made that sort of announcement. In fact, all of them had a better case for missing those Olympics than Nash does for missing the upcoming Beijing games:

• While the Salt lake City Olympics happened in the middle of an NHL season in which all three were captaining their respective teams (Sakic and Yzerman were both leading teams expected to vie for the cup, much like Nash’s current situation in Phoenix), the Beijing Olympics — as well as the qualifying tournament — will happen in the summertime, when there is no season to interrupt and eight months to recover before the next playoffs. The NHLers had six weeks of regular season hockey separating the end of the Olympics and the start of the playoffs.
• Steve Nash has a bad back. No secret. Guess what? Mario Lemieux’s back problems were worse. Mario needed someone to lace up his skates for him in the latter half of his career. Joe Sakic, it’s true, was relatively healthy. Yzerman, however, would not have been lying had he begged off by saying he was playing on one leg. That story is well documented. Two of those three had better cases than Nash to miss the tournament due to injury.
• Had Yzerman, Lemieux and Sakic missed that tournament — while the outrage and disappointment of Canadian fans would have been severe — there wasn’t exactly a shortage of capable players to step in and fill the holes in the lineup. Perhaps no one with their leadership credentials would have been available (there WASN’T really anyone else with those kind of creds), but Joe Thornton, Brendan Shanahan, Paul Kariya, Jarome Iginla and Scott Niedermayer were not exactly also-rans. In comparison, Steve Nash is by far the best player Canada could hope to have on its national basketball team. After him, we have only the newly-Canadian Samuel Dalembert and the always-absent Jamal Magloire — no one with skill anywhere close to residing in Nash’s lofty stratosphere.

But Nash isn’t playing, he isn’t really apologizing for not playing … and we’re all okay with that.

Perhaps we’re so blown away by the idea of a little, white point-guard from British Columbia leading his team to an NBA championship that we’ll forgive him his absence from a team that — even with him and all his prodigious skill — would be lucky to sneak past the round-robin portion of the Beijing games.

Perhaps we just like the guy so much that we’re willing to let him do what he wants with the few years of elite-level play he has left. After all, as I said above, he is as good a person as he is a basketball player.

Perhaps — and this one, at least, is true — a berth in the Olympic basketball tournament wouldn’t mean nearly as much to us as a country as that Gold medal in Olympic hockey that we’d been denied for 50 years. Perhaps we just don’t care enough about hoops to demand the same dedication from our ballers that we’ve come to expect from our puckheads.

Either way, Steve Nash is getting a free pass. Does he deserve it? I don’t know. He has my respect, as both an athlete and a human being. But he’s only 33, there sure seems to be a lot of life left in him and I know that if he was a hockey player I wouldn’t even ask him if he was planning on playing in the Olympics. I would expect him — as the best at what he does in our entire nation — to be honoured to wear the red and white.

But apparently, because he wears sneakers instead of skates, a lot of us don’t feel that way. Why is that?