Steve Nash: Defense is our No. 1 priority

Nash is looking forward to coaching Kyrie Irving: He has an incredible skill level, like off the charts. As skilled of a player as perhaps we’ve ever seen in this league

Steve Nash talks about the style of play he plans on bringing to the Brooklyn Nets.

“Defense is our No. 1 priority, protecting the paint and guarding the basket is going to be the bedrock of our defense and so, without sharing all the principles we’re building and all the things we’re designing right now, I can just assure you that we realize to win a championship we need to be a very strong defensive team, great cohesion, clear understanding of our principles and be able to execute them with variation every night because every team we play is going to be different”

On the offense.

“I want us to play fast, I want us to space the floor,” said Nash. “I want us to create opportunities to get downhill with our ballhandlers and make plays for one another. Attack closeouts. A lot of high-level philosophical thoughts, and of course we’ll design and have offensive sets and things that we think fit our group, but we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves with the offense. We want it to stay pretty high-level right now”

The Nets have added to the coaching staff Mike D’Antoni and Ime Udoka as assistant coaches and Amar’e Stoudemire as assistant to player development.