Why the Suns Retired Steve Nash's #13: The Two-Time MVP Who Revolutionized Basketball

The spring of 2005. The Phoenix Suns are celebrating their new most valuable player during a second-round series against Dallas, and the building is doing something arenas rarely do for a point guard — it is roaring the way it usually saves for a dunk. Steve Nash, thirty-one years old, his hair already falling into his eyes, accepts the trophy and looks faintly embarrassed by the whole thing. A year earlier he had been a free agent the rest of the league regarded as good-not-great, a passer in his thirties whose best basketball was presumed to be behind him. Now he is the engine of the most thrilling offense in the sport, the first guard in a decade to be named the league's best player, and he is about to do it again the following spring. The number on his back is 13. A decade later the Phoenix Suns would raise it to the rafters, where no Phoenix player will ever wear it again.

The strange thing about Nash's two MVP awards is that the people who saw him every night understood them immediately, and almost everyone else spent years arguing about them. He never led the league in scoring. He never won a title. He was not the most athletic guard of his era or the tenth most athletic. What he had instead was a way of seeing the floor a half-second before it arranged itself, and a system built by a coach who trusted that vision completely. Together they did not just win games. They rewrote how the sport is played.

That is the case for #13, and it does not require a championship to make it.

Victoria, British Columbia — The Wrong Country for It

Nash grew up in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, in a household where the family sport was soccer — his father John had played professionally, and the footwork Steve later brought to a basketball court was, by his own telling, the footwork of a winger. Canada in the 1980s was not a basketball country, and Victoria was not even a hockey town the way the mainland was. He played at St. Michaels University School, fell for the game with the obsessiveness of someone who had discovered it slightly too late and was determined to make up the distance, and emerged as the best high school player in the province with almost no one south of the border watching.

The major American programs did not recruit him. The reel of a skinny Canadian point guard with a strange shooting motion did not move anyone in an era that prized size and explosion. Santa Clara, a small Jesuit school in the West Coast Conference, was effectively the only Division I program to offer a scholarship — a decision that looks, in retrospect, like one of the great talent-evaluation bargains in college basketball history. Over four seasons Nash became the most decorated guard in the conference, twice its player of the year, and dragged a mid-major into the NCAA Tournament, including a first-round upset of second-seeded Arizona in 1993 that put his name in front of a national audience for the first time.

Drafted Into the Desert, Then Sent Away

Phoenix selected him 15th overall in the 1996 draft — a class remembered for Allen Iverson, Kobe Bryant, and Ray Allen, with Nash a curiosity slotted in the middle of the first round. The pick was booed at the Suns' draft party; the fans wanted a finished player, not a project from a school they could not place. For two seasons he learned behind veteran guards and watched the tail end of Charles Barkley's Phoenix tenure up close, absorbing what a winning locker room felt like without yet being the reason it won. He was a sharp, intelligent passer who had not assembled the full offensive arsenal that was still years away.

In 1998 the Suns traded him to the Dallas Mavericks, and the detour turned out to be the making of him. Across six seasons in Dallas, paired with a young Dirk Nowitzki, Nash refined the pick-and-roll into something close to an art form, rebuilt his jumper into a genuine three-point weapon, and learned to run an offense as its primary author rather than its assistant. By 2004 he was unmistakably one of the best point guards alive — and when Dallas declined to commit to a guard entering his thirties at the price he commanded, Phoenix made the move that would define the franchise for a generation. Nash came home to the desert as a free agent in the summer of 2004. You can read the full arc on his player profile, but the short version is that the Suns drafted the potential and Dallas delivered back the player.

Seven Seconds or Less

What happened next did not look like NBA basketball as it had been played for the previous two decades. The orthodoxy of the early 2000s was slow, physical, walk-it-up halfcourt offense — the post-up, the isolation, the long contested two. Then Phoenix hired Mike D'Antoni, handed him Nash, and tore the orthodoxy up. The directive that gave the team its name was almost absurdly simple: get the ball up the floor and into a good shot before the shot clock dropped below seven seconds. Don't wait for the defense to set. Beat it down the court before it can decide who is guarding whom.

Nash was the conductor of all of it. He pushed the ball off makes and misses alike, read the floor before defenders could establish position, and delivered passes to Shawn Marion, Amar'e Stoudemire, and Joe Johnson in the exact stride and angle that turned a good look into a layup. The Suns led the league in scoring for several consecutive seasons and were, by broad consensus, the most entertaining team in the sport — appointment television on any night they played. They won 62 games in Nash's first season back, the kind of leap that does not happen by adding one player unless that one player is rearranging the molecular structure of how his teammates move.

The radical part was not the speed alone. It was the spacing. D'Antoni's Suns stationed shooters at the arc, gave Nash a rolling big man in Stoudemire, and let the geometry do the work — the same geometry every contender would adopt a decade later and call modern basketball. They were running the future while the rest of the league was still arguing about whether it would work.

Back-to-Back MVP — The Guard Nobody Drafted for This

In 2004-05 Nash was named the NBA's Most Valuable Player, the first point guard to win the award in more than a decade. He averaged roughly 15.5 points and 11.5 assists a game while shooting 50.2 percent from the field, 43 percent from three, and nearly 89 percent from the line — a stat line that, for a lead guard, simply had no precedent. The following season he won it again, becoming one of only a handful of players in league history to repeat as MVP, and one of an even smaller group of guards ever to do it.

Voters and skeptics spent years relitigating whether a player who scored in the mid-teens deserved either trophy. The answer lived in the second-order effects. Nash made the players around him demonstrably better — Stoudemire and Marion posted the most efficient seasons of their careers in his orbit, and role players who were ordinary elsewhere became dangerous the moment they shared a backcourt with him. He led the league in assists five separate times. He bent defenses not by overpowering them but by knowing, before they did, where they were about to be wrong.

And he did it while being one of the purest shooters the sport has produced. Nash finished as a member of the 50-40-90 club — 50 percent from the field, 40 percent from three, and 90 percent from the line across a full season — more times than any other player in NBA history, a feat that requires being elite at three distinct skills at once. His career free-throw percentage of 90.43 percent stands as the best ever recorded. That a player could lead the league in assists while shooting at those marks created a two-for-one problem no defense of the era was built to answer: help off him and he carved you up with passes; stay home and he scored with absurd efficiency.

The Title That Never Came — and the 2007 Wound

The Suns of this era produced three straight 50-win seasons and reached the Western Conference Finals more than once, but the championship that felt destined never arrived. The deepest cut was 2007. Phoenix and the San Antonio Spurs were locked in a series many believed would decide the real champion, and in Game 4 a hard foul by Robert Horry on Nash sent Stoudemire and Boris Diaw a few steps off the Phoenix bench. The league's rulebook was unambiguous: leaving the bench area during an altercation drew an automatic suspension. Both were ruled out of Game 5. Phoenix lost that game, then the series. San Antonio went on to win the title.

It remains one of the most debated officiating outcomes in playoff history — a championship arguably decided by a letter-of-the-law suspension for two players who never threw a punch. Nash himself never reached an NBA Finals across his entire career, repeatedly stopped at the doorstep of the West. Some will hold that absence against the legacy. They are reading the wrong scoreboard.

The Numbers Behind the Number

• 2× NBA Most Valuable Player (2004-05 and 2005-06) — one of only a handful of players ever to repeat, and the rare guard to do it
• 8× NBA All-Star across his career
• Led the NBA in assists per game five separate seasons
• Career free-throw percentage of 90.43% — the highest in league history
• Member of the 50-40-90 shooting club more times than any player in NBA history
• Drafted 15th overall in 1996 out of Santa Clara; returned to Phoenix as a free agent in 2004
• Engine of the "Seven Seconds or Less" Suns — three consecutive 50-win seasons and multiple Western Conference Finals appearances
• Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Class of 2018
• NBA 75th Anniversary Team (2021)
• Later an NBA head coach, carrying the offensive ideas he helped pioneer into a new generation

None of those lines contains the actual argument. The argument is that the league you watch today is the one Nash and D'Antoni sketched in the desert two decades ago. The three-point revolution, the death of the walk-it-up possession, the premium on passing big men and floor spacing, the assumption that a great offense should look fast and feel inevitable — all of it traces back to a Phoenix team running #13 at warp speed while the rest of the NBA insisted it was a gimmick that would not survive a playoff series. The imitation came later, and it never stopped.

Why #13 Hangs Forever

The Suns retired Steve Nash's #13 in 2015, and no Phoenix player has worn it since. Retiring a number is usually a verdict about championships. This one is a verdict about ideas — an acknowledgment that something happened in this franchise that changed the sport beyond it, even though the trophy case from those years stays empty.

That is the harder kind of legacy to honor and, in some ways, the more honest one. Championships validate systems. Nash's system needed no validation, because the entire league spent the following decade copying it — building around guards who could shoot, prioritizing pace and ball movement over isolation, hunting the exact spacing he and D'Antoni weaponized first. The modern NBA is, in a real and traceable sense, Steve Nash's NBA. Phoenix is where he proved it.

His number hangs alongside the other Suns greats whose careers defined what Phoenix basketball is supposed to mean — Charles Barkley's #34, the force of nature who dragged the franchise to its first Finals; Kevin Johnson's #7, the explosive point guard who set the template Nash would later reinvent; and Dan Majerle's #9, the gritty wing whose name still draws the loudest ovations in the building. None of them won a title in Phoenix either. Together they tell you that this franchise has always measured greatness by something other than the final trophy — by the way the game looked when its best players had the ball.

Nash measured higher than anyone. He took a sport that had decided how it wanted to be played and quietly proved it wrong, one seven-second possession at a time. #13 hangs in Phoenix forever because the franchise is still living inside the game he built — and so, whether it admits it or not, is the rest of the league.