Steve Nash retires

You are totally correct there. I blame the required Internet style of best-ever-ism for any exaggeration.

 

The last two number one picks are Canadian and there are Canadians all over Div. 1 basketball. Prior to Nash this never happened. The popularity of the game is significantly higher alll across the country.

 

League wide there is no comparison but I'm not sure that's what's being said here.

 

Those who follow basketball recruiting might have an answer for you. The change in basketball talent level coming from Canada today compared to a couple decades ago is nothing short of staggering. The country went from a talent wasteland to a relative hotbed, now churning out a constant stream of high D1 and NBA caliber players. In the 90s a Canadian player was a rare novelty, now they're everywhere.

I'm guessin that Nash making the game more popular up there just might've had something to do with that transformation.

 

This not a shot at Nash at all, but I believe Vince Carter had a bigger impact on Canadian Basketball than Steve Nash.

 

Now that makes for an interesting debate.

 

You forgot Cousy.

 

Vince certainly inspired a lot of kids in the Toronto area, but if you're talking Canada-wide I'd argue Nash means more.

Certainly they both can take some credit.

 

Maybe some think Canadian hoops still is Leo Rautins and everyone else.

 

As you would say - woooooooo! But yeah, as Gomer said, it's probably both of them that contributed to the upswing in basketball's popularity in Canada. Well, them, and I'd add in how much easier it is to catch NBA games in the past 20 years. In Simmons' 5,000 page basketball book, he talked about how tough it was even now to find footage from certain 1970s and even 1980s era games. The NBA on TNT started in 1988, the playoff broadcasting got a lot better in the 1990s, and by the 2000s you had regular season games shown on ABC. I'm positive that all probably had a "trickle up the border" effect. (Along similar lines, I can't remember if it was Bill James or one of the Baseball Prospectus' annuals that noted that the Braves and Cubs got a big revenue boost in the 1990s because they had nationwide / large regional cable networks broadcasting their game.)

 

IMO it really has more to do with the rise of AAU club competition and the decline of US high school basketball as the primary venue for college scouting.

When HS game play was the biggest factor in college scouting, the lack of competition in Canada was a huge disadvantage -- probably by a power of 10 or more.

Now of course nobody gets recruited on the basis of HS team play, everybody is recruited off their performance in AAU club play and all-star camps, and 90 percent of all Canadians live within 100 miles of the border, so most of the recruitable hoops players will play on US-based AAU teams anyway.

 

Both were great, great players. I feel bad for Nash that he was so incredible and couldn't win a title. But if we're talking about who did more in Canada for the game they played, I would argue that hockey really didn't need much done for it. It was already the nation's biggest game by far. Although Gretzky was a transcendent player, I think the game would still be as big as ever in Canada even if there'd never been a Gretzky.