Will Steve Nash's latest back injury end his NBA career?

This could be it for Steve Nash, at least as an NBA player. The Los Angeles Lakers point guard will be out for the entirety of the 2014-15 season due to nerve injuries in his back, a long-term condition that worsened after Nash suffered a freak injury while lifting bags earlier this month. While there has been no official announcement it looks entirely possible that this could mark the end of his professional basketball career.

Nash’s contract with the Lakers ends this season, and before it had even began, the 40-year old Canadian announced it would be his last. Furthermore, he said that he would not play basketball outside of the LA area if he were to continue and neither the Lakers or the rival Clippers seem like they would have any use Nash, who would be the oldest player in the league by then.

There you have it, a hall of fame career felled by luggage. Not an entirely pretty end, if it indeed is one, but few ends are.

The news isn’t a huge blow to the Lakers, as they weren’t expecting much from the already hobbled Nash at this point. Their most recent plan was to have him back up former global phenomenon Jeremy Lin. The draft picks they traded away to the Phoenix Suns to acquire the eight time all-star and the hefty contract – three years/$28m – they handed Nash must now seem like sunk cost. In fact, considering how much the Lakers are expected to struggle this season, his absence could help them tank their way to a lower draft pick.

The loss instead will be felt more by the entire basketball world, which is most likely losing one of its longest-tenured legends. Drafted by the Phoenix Suns out of Santa Clara in 1996, Nash was traded to the Dallas Mavericks in 1998, where he played alongside future rival Dirk Nowitzki. He struggled to stay on court early on, hampered by the back issues which now threaten his career.

Although he was a star with the Mavericks, his career reached its apex when he returned to the Suns via free agency in 2004. Playing under head coach Mike D’Antoni’s fast-paced “seven seconds or less” system alongside all-stars Amar’e Stoudemire and Shawn Marion, Nash ran one of the most dangerous, and most entertaining, teams in the league.

At his peak, Nash was one of the most exciting offensive players in basketball. Nash was a great scorer but was, as befits one of the best point guards of all time, even more adept when it came to assists. He currently sits third all time in that particular stat (10,335), behind John Stockton and Jason Kidd. His free throw percentage of 90.4 is the best in NBA history. He won back-to-back MVPs in 2005 and 2006, the second of which was (seriously) immortalized in the lyrics of Nelly Furtado’s pop hit Promiscuous.

He also emerged as one of the more interesting players in the NBA, and not just because of the novelty of seeing this goofy-looking guy from Canada running circles around opponents with his long hair flopping about. Nash was just as likely to gain attention from his off-court interests as his play on the field whether it was his fanatical obsession with nutrition, which most likely allowed him to play 19 seasons despite his back, or his more controversial forays into areas like environmentalism and anti-war activism.

The decline came after the rebuilding Suns traded Nash to the Lakers in 2012. Along with Kobe Bryant and Dwight Howard, he was supposed to be part of a Big Three west coast that could stack up against the Miami Heat’s trio of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in an NBA Finals. That would-be superteam dissolved quickly. Nash suffered a leg fracture just two games into the 2012-13 season and was not his old self when he played, the Lakers lost Bryant to an Achilles injury before the playoffs and a disgruntled Howard left in free agency after the San Antonio Spurs swept them in the first round.

Nash’s 2013-14 season was similarly injury-plagued and he played his last meaningful game for the Lakers on 4 April. Barring a miracle comeback, Nash will have ended up playing a total of just 65 games with Los Angeles while looking like a shadow of himself through most of them.

— Isaiah Thomas (@Isaiah_Thomas) October 24, 2014

Damn damn damn. Hate to see Steve Nash go out like this. 1 of the best PGs to ever play the game!

Nash hasn’t had a perfect career. He’s what’s known as an offense-first player, which is a polite way of saying that he’s mostly been a non-factor defensively. In hindsight, and even at the time, it’s hard to seriously believe Nash was more deserving of the MVP over Kobe Bryant in 2006, at least in purely basketball terms. Most damning of all, Nash would retire now without ever being on a team that won a title or even appeared in the NBA Finals.

Still, history will remember Nash was one of the best players of his era, a surefire hall-of-famer. He’s already a national icon in his home country. Nash, who was born in South Africa but raised in British Columbia, was the captain of Canada’s basketball team in the 2000 Olympics and was named its GM in 2012, but that doesn’t even begin to cover his legacy. Not only is Nash clearly the best basketball player Canada has ever produced, it could be argued that he’s one of the best players in Canadian history, period.

So if his latest injury does end up being the end of Steve Nash’s 19-year NBA career, well, it’s been one of the more remarkable ones the game has seen.