In light of his official retirement announcement, this week has unofficially been Steve Nash Week, especially for me. In the past few days, I’ve looked at how his game has not only influenced how aspiring young ballers are trained, but how NBA coaches prepare their teams defensively. And what’s incredible is that those two articles -- and the numerous other ones floating around the internet right now -- still don’t capture the entirety of his impact. So for the final segment of this retirement parade, I wanted to revisit a unique aspect of Nash’s on-court chemistry with Amar’e Stoudemire -- the Amar’e cut.

While any word association game between those two likely invokes the response “pick-and-roll”, one of the most clever creations from those Mike D’Antoni Suns teams was how those two interacted outside that staple action. When their point guard penetrates the paint, most big men stick to a pretty standard plan of attack: they lurk behind the defense, waiting for their defender to stop the more threaten drive before happily accepting a pass from their driving teammate for a finish along the baseline.

And while Stoudemire obviously did this plenty, as the video above shows, his special connection with Nash also produced something that I haven’t seen since the two of them were terrorizing teams in the Valley of the Sun. Instead of chillin’ along the baseline as his defender moved to slow Nash, Stoudemire would move in a way that would make youth coaches tear their hair out; right toward his teammate dribbling the ball. Stoudemire would cut at Nash, catch a (usually clever) pass, then curl around the Canadian’s back and finish at the rim with both defenders in his wake.

On a traditional drop off pass and finish -- like the one in the first video -- a good (or long and athletic) defender has a chance to both step up and stop the drive while quickly turning around to recover and block or bother any finish by the big catching along the baseline. This clever cut by Stoudemire worked to thwart that. By cutting around behind Nash, Stoudemire essentially took the big man guarding him out of the play by turning his point guard into a (albeit moving) screener.

Now this isn’t a totally new concept in basketball as offensives like the dribble-drive have similar movements. The difference is that type of cut, even in an offense like the dribble drive, is typically reserved for players on the perimeter, an area of the floor where it’s much easier for both the driver and the passer to get the most out of the play. And that’s why this carefully choreographed basketball dance might always be unique to these two players.

For starters, the history of the game is filled with surreal athletes, but I’m not sure many stood out the way the young, relatively healthy version of Stoudemire did. As former ESPN scribe, Beckley Mason, put it in a conversation with me this week, the Nash-Mike D’Antoni years included the version of Stoudamire that seemingly about finished every catch within about 20-feet of the basket with an emphatic dunk. That type of explosiveness is a requirement to circle behind a penetrating point guard and basically catch, bound and attack the rim -- sometimes over Nash’s trailing defender -- all in a split second.

The second half of that equation? Nash, of course. To make the connection with a moving target amidst the teeth of the defense not only requires his unbelievable court vision, but that uncanny array of passes Nash had in his arsenal. Whether it was a soft jump pass or a clever off-hand flick behind, Nash had ways to throw catchable passes in traffic for his big man to finish.

Because of this unique overlap of skills, Nash and Stoudemire created an on-court language that no NBA duo may ever be able to speak again. I’m just glad we had the opportunity to listen.