Steve Nash has been playing through the pain of a pelvic injury for a while, but after Thursday night’s blowout loss to the Nuggets — one in which he only attempted four shots — he said it’s gotten to the point where he can no longer do so until it improves.
Nash said after practice on Friday that the injury is too limiting for him to continue to try to play through it, and was held out of practice on Saturday in hopes that he’d be feeling well enough to go in Sunday’s nationally televised matchup with the Orlando Magic.
“We don’t know, it’ll be a game time decision,” Gentry said of Nash’s status. “But if he doesn’t go, we’ll have to have guys step up. We’ll have to do a hell of a lot better than we did today, though.”
Gentry was upset at the effort level of his players at Saturday morning’s practice, and seemed angry that with his team coming off of a bad home loss on Thursday, and with a high-quality team like Orlando up next, that his guys weren’t a little more focused.
“No, I didn’t get anything done today,” Gentry said, when asked if he got what he wanted out of the morning’s practice. “I don’t know (if it was a lack of focus), you’d have to talk to them. Ask them why on a situation where we’ve got a game at 12:30 tomorrow why our focus wasn’t there. You’ll have to ask them that, because it was awful. It was not good. We didn’t get one thing accomplished today.”
The only player that talked specifically about the practice was Jared Dudley, who jokingly explained why he wasn’t to blame, before responding more seriously to the issue.
“Yeah, (coach) said we didn’t go hard. I mean, the white team was up 11-zero,” Dudley said, while still wearing his white practice jersey. “I told him, if he wants us to slow down, we can slow down.
“But I think it’s good, though. He’s basically saying it’s crunch time, 18 games left, we can’t mess around, we’ve got to be focused, we’ve got to be engaged in every play. And that’s good. We needed to hear that.”
It’s unclear whether or not Nash’s absence may have had something to do with the lack of focus at practice, but you can pretty much guarantee that his absence will have a huge effect on the Suns’ chances against the Magic. But that remains a question mark until Sunday morning.
“If he’s healthy enough to play, he’ll play,” Gentry said. “I don’t worry about Steve because I know that if there’s any way he can go, he’ll go. And if he doesn’t go, it’s because there’s no way that he can. If he’s not going, then he’s got to be really, really hurt. Just understand that.”
