 I'm your host, Diane Eagle. It is the NBA offseason, a circuitous route, but we got here and the NBA regular season for 2021 may be just around the corner, that's the hope at least. A lot of anticipation building for the Brooklyn Nets, Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, the fact that they will team together. Finally, there's so much buildup for this and there will be a new head coach for the Brooklyn Nets. It is Steve Nash. It is my pleasure to welcome him to the fold right now. Coach, how you doing? Great, how are you, Ion? Doing great. Have you gotten used to that? Someone calling you coach? Not quite, it's still a little strange. And I think that's probably gonna take some time for me to get used to, but you know how this league is, it comes hard and fast, so I'm sure once we get started, I'll get equipped to it pretty quickly. You realize for the rest of your life now, there's the potential that you're just gonna be called coach. Steve just floats away, it's just coach, coach, hey coach, coach. It is weird, I even have friends now calling me coach. I think it's become a habit for them, which is sort of annoying, but I love it. It's been a lot of fun getting my feet wet, building and getting our staff going and connecting with all our departments and putting together a plan. Sean Marks has done an incredible job building, very mature organization, so to speak. All the departments are incredibly well-staffed, with talented, human capital and resources. So for me to slide in here, I have a ton of support, some incredible people to lean on and collaborate with, starting with my coaching staff. So it's been fun, I'm enjoying every day. Well, coach, we have a lot of questions for you. We have fans logging on from all over the world to check this out online. Brooklyn Nets fans watching on the Yes Network right now. I've got questions, we've got questions that were submitted by our season ticket members, we'll get to those. And for anybody that is watching on Facebook right now, you'll get an opportunity to post a question on Facebook live. So get your comments ready, we're gonna choose one question, we'll work it in over the course of this conversation. We encourage you to get involved. Also, I wanna welcome the students from Howard University Sports Marketing class, they're watching today. This is a learning process for all of us. And Steve, let's get right to it. 18 years in the NBA, Hall of Famer is a player. At what point did it strike you that maybe coaching was something that you would consider in your future? It's a great question. I don't know if I could put a date on it, but certainly I think I always realized that I would like and enjoy coaching. I think it took me a while and a directive of trying to get away from the game and have some separation from being a player and having that be my identity and purpose for so many years. That transition needed to take place. I also love being a dad and have five kids. And so that gave me the space to do that with everything I had. And then over the last few years, I realized that there was an itch warming and that I was starting to gain some interest in taking that leap at some point. Started to take more note and study and start to listen to what different people do on all different aspects of coaching and building and creating a culture and that dynamic of a winning environment. So I think that collided with this incredible opportunity, this moment in time here with this organization that's just continued to grow and build and in such impressive leaps and bounds and the roster and like I said earlier, all the departments are so mature that it's an opportunity that was just too good to pass up. Well, it sounds like you already have a strong starting five with your kids. So that's a really good start. How about influential coaches that you played for and did any of them play a role as you were considering taking this net-side coaching job? Indirectly, they all, they all played a role. Directly, not as much but going back to like my junior high school coaches had a huge impact on me. My high school coach is as good a coach as I've played for. My college coach was incredible, Dick Davy. Then I got to play for some terrific NBA coaches Danny Ainge, Don Nelson, Mike D'Antoni, Alvin Gentry. Down the line, there's so many guys that have had an impact on me. While they didn't necessarily directly impact this decision and this opportunity and my decision to take it, but their lessons, those experiences I gained from them will definitely be a part of who I am and what I bring to the table as a coach. There's a lot of offensive talent on this basketball team. What do you envision running? What kind of system are you visualizing for this group? Well, it's all still to be determined and I definitely don't wanna come in with too many hard and fast concepts and designs. You know, I'd much rather come in with principles, with ideas and allow our players to collaborate with us and to allow their personalities and the dynamic between them and the chemistry to have a role in how it evolves. I think people talk about the Phoenix teams I played on and this sort of revolutionary tone of how we impacted the game, but the truth be told, Mike D'Antoni's brilliance in much of that was that he allowed it to evolve instead of getting in the way and I think a lot of coaches feel like they have to design every aspect of something and I think you leave stuff on the table that can be found through the personalities, the connectivity and the dynamic and on the floor and in the room. So I want us to play fast. I want us to space the floor, to create opportunities to get downhill with our ball handlers and make plays for one another, attack closeouts. So a lot of high level philosophical thoughts and of course we'll design and have, you know, offensive sets and things, you know, that we think fit our group but we don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves with, you know, the offense. We wanted to stay pretty high level right now as frankly we build our defense and spend, you know, all of our time over the last few weeks building that. Steve, I mentioned we have a bunch of questions from our season ticket members. Let's go to our first one here. It's David Burton. He's been a season ticket member since 1992, old school question for you coach. What do you think has been the biggest change in the NBA from when you retired as a player until now? Well, there's a few. I would say analytics is probably the biggest change but right there with it, you know, the performance side of the sport has continually changed and evolved to where players are getting the best care, the best preparation, prevention, best practices in how to become the best athlete and sustain the season. So that's continually evolved but I think analytics is at the heart of even the physical performance but also the way people are playing the style they're playing, how they're defending, how they're trying to create opportunities offensively and obviously the value of the three point shot is a huge part of that data driven, you know, area but it's the same with all the other departments of basketball, you know, analytics has grown so much that we are able to break down and have data and create arguments and support arguments through the data and that's informed a lot of what you're seeing on the floor without necessarily knowing that that was data driven. Coach, post playing career, you took a position with the Golden State Warriors, a team that was winning championships, a team that was redefining in many ways the way this game could be played and on that squad, Kevin Durant, what kind of relationship did you develop with Kevin during your days at Golden State together? Well, we have a strong relationship I think it actually started before that when I was finishing my career, ironically, Adam Harrington one of our assistant coaches here with the Nets was at the time, Kevin's personal coach. We're talking 2013 perhaps. So he connected Kevin in a way that maybe I could help, you know, guide and mentor him in a sense is that he was a player entering his prime and I was a player quickly exiting my prime and I could share with him some of the experiences I've had and we developed a bond over the game and that led to the Warrior situation a few years later where we continue to develop our relationship and here we are working together again. So, you know, he's just a human being that I have a lot of love for and a lot of belief in and the type of person he is and character he is and as far as a basketball player, I mean, he's historically unique and impactful and he's one of the all-time greats already and he's still got a chapter to write here. And as you could imagine, Nets fans are just filled with anticipation to see him in that Nets uniform to see him performing out on the court and it leads to the next obvious question and it's Kyrie Irving, a position you played. You were as dynamic a point guard as we had seen in this league, two-time MVP. How does that translate in the role of being a coach and coaching a player that is so highly skilled and unique that happens to play the same position that you played for so long? Well, first of all, it's a thrill for me to get to coach Kyrie. I mean, he's incredible skill level, like off the chart.