Nick Nurse was the wunderkind for a time in Toronto.
His story was unique, bouncing between assist coaching gigs in Midwest NCAA schools and Head Coaching positions in Europe, particularly the British Basketball League (BBL), for much of the 90s and early 2000s. He joined the NBA G League (Then D League) in the late 2000s and made his name running the Houston Rockets’ affiliate team, the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, overseeing an offensive experiment in how to launch as many triples as possible. He won two D-League championships, one with the Iowa Energy and then one with Rio Grande. That launched him into the Toronto Raptors’ organization as an assistant coach, where he designed the team’s offense in 2017-18 under Dwayne Casey. Taking the reins after Casey left, Nurse won a championship in his rookie year as NBA Head Coach.
Nurse was popular and charming early on as an NBA Head Coach. He loved to tell stories about his early coaching days, particularly in the BBL. He had an experienced and talented roster that fit smoothly with Nurse’s penchant for top-down leadership — Kyle Lowry, who ran the locker room as a Raptor led in much the same way. As long as the team was competing for a championship, which it did in 2019 and again, to an extent, in 2020, the fit was seamless. Nurse is a tactical genius, and in many ways, his work with Toronto’s defense changed the way the entire league played on that end of the floor.
As the context around the Raptors has changed, so too has Nurse’s status with the team. Fred VanVleet runs the locker room much the same was as Lowry did, and he seems to have the same approach as Nurse, but that’s not true of every Raptor. Reports are that Nurse has clashed with multiple of his players, including a publicly reported clash with Pascal Siakam during the Tampa season. Nurse has been vocal criticizing players with the media, including Chris Boucher and others. With Toronto fairly middle-of-the-pack for the last three seasons, things have changed.
It’s possible people tire of BBL stories after a time, and it’s possible that Nurse became more abrasive and less patient with his interpersonal skills over time. Or that those things are more evident when the defense is letting Zach LaVine waltz to the layups in a play-in game, rather than forcing turnovers on Steph Curry in a championship game. Or that conflict eventually builds and reaches a boiling point. But it’s clear that Nurse is not as beloved, internally or externally, as he was once.
That is clear in a few different ways. A quick timeline:
- Doug Smith of the Toronto Star wrote a piece on March 30 that said in the very beginning that “The chirping has already started around the NBA, and it’s going to become more prevalent as the Raptors season reaches its ultimately disappointing conclusion. You’ll hear that Nick Nurse may be out as the coach.” Doug is incredibly well sourced within the Raptors’ organization, and he would not write this piece without cause. He also said that it didn’t seem particularly likely, but the rumours were certainly in existence around the league at that point. I’ve heard that from a couple other places as well.
- Before Toronto’s game on March 31 against the Philadelphia 76ers, Nurse brought up — relatively unprompted from the actual question from ESPN’s Tim Bontemps — that he needed to reassess his future with the franchise. He said: “First of all, I think when this season gets done, we’ll evaluate everything, and even personally, I’m gonna take a few weeks to see where I’m at, you know? Like you said, where my head’s at. And just see how the relationship with the organization is and everything. It’s been 10 years for me now, which is a pretty good run.”
- He shut down all conversation on the topic after that, including a snippy response to Lindsay Dunn from CityNews about being asked about the topic over and over (which was not true).
- After the season, Nurse elaborated slightly: “We’ve always been on the same page and have a great level of communication. Our goals are to win here, and that takes some evaluation on all fronts. That’s all.”
- Sportsnet’s Michael Grange pressed Nurse on his comments in Philadelphia, and the exchange was heated at times. Nurse said he did not regret his comments, and he seemed to blame media for discussing the topic. He did say that he loves it as the coach in Toronto.
- The front office was not happy with Nurse’s comments in Philadelphia, and “they let him know it,” according to TSN’s Josh Lewenberg, another extremely plugged-in Raptors’ insider.
That is the timeline. Oh, also: VanVleet said “we just have to find another identity,” when asked about offseason needs. VanVleet is as honest as they come, and he was not necessarily criticizing Nurse and his schemes. Nurse could well be the one to help Toronto find that new identity. But it’s probable the team doesn’t believe this current vibes-based offense is the answer.
Reading a little bit into Nurse’s conversations with media, and reports from media, it seems as though Nurse and the Raptors are headed for a mutual breakup. But is that for the best?
It doesn’t seem as though Nurse has lost the locker room, with no public complaints and plenty of public support from his players after the season ended. And Nurse remains a brilliant tactical coach. His playoff adjustments have been excellent historically, and he has a long history of strategic success. His offensive innovations five years ago were analytically sound — maximizing rim-and-3 basketball — and he also helped pioneer “possession basketball” that has since leaked into coaching staff choices in Memphis, Oklahoma City, Minnesota, and elsewhere.
It is arguable that no coach in the league would have wrung more wins out of the Raptors since Tampa Bay. It’s not Nurse’s fault that the Raptors haven’t addressed their flaws as a team. (Even if Nurse’s shooting school doesn’t necessarily work as advertised.) Nurse found a way to address Toronto’s offensive inability to shoot — crash the glass. He found a way to address Toronto’s defensive inability to force misses — force turnovers instead. No coach is better at limiting opposing stars.
He integrated Poeltl fantastically, kept a high efficiency on after-timeout plays (particularly coming from the sideline), had a number of well-designed set plays, and did oversee real improvement over the second half of the season. It’s not Nurse’s fault that the Raptors had fewer and lesser shooters than any team in the league, outside of those that were trying to lose basketball games
Yes, Nurse had a tendency to overplay his trusted players (read: starters) and underdevelop his young projects (read: bench players). As a result, players like Malachi Flynn seem not to be improving after fits and starts as chances. Players like Justin Champagnie never got those chances to begin with. Those issues have added up, but they only indicate a coach who has been trying to maximize wins in the present at the expense of possible, around-the-edges improvement in the future. That’s who Nurse always was — a win maximizer. Sure, he’s made some mistakes along the way. But the process has been (relatively) sound.
In the big picture, there are 29 teams around the league who already have coaches like Nurse in house — tactical minds who implement foundational strategy and eke the best out of their best players — or want coaches like him. But it’s not certain that every team would want him. The soft skills such as personal relationships with players haven’t necessarily been as strong as his hard skills. It’s possible he’s worn out his welcome in Toronto, and reading the tea leaves, insinuated in Philadelphia that “you can’t fire me, I quit.”
While there is an enormous amount of coaching talent in the ether at the moment, available for the hiring, perhaps none or few of those coaches would be able to steer Toronto as successfully within the playoffs as Nurse has proven himself able to do. But Toronto hasn’t proven itself ready to use that skill anyway. The team isn’t contending for a championship at the moment, so a championship coach isn’t necessarily what the doctor ordered.
Ultimately, Nurse probably isn’t at fault for what happened in Toronto this season. Certainly not entirely. That doesn’t mean he should be the coach next season. I’m of the mind that losing Nurse will likely help Toronto in the short term, especially as establishing a new identity, building a new offense, and redistributing voices seems like a requirement for this team to survive. All of those things are easier with a new coach. Yet losing Nurse probably hurts Toronto in the long term. (Although, if Toronto can’t fix its identity, that long term won’t come, so there could be a little bit of a Catch-22 there.)
The biggest change has to be modernization of the offense — that’s the identity component to which VanVleet referred. Efficiency is skyrocketing across the league, leaving the Raptors in the malnourished pages of history. The Raptors need to find easy points, need to add pace within the half-court, need to add shooting and rim pressure, need to better organize its spacing and the cuts within that foundation, need to create more and more threatening passes; basically, they need to stop demanding their players run uphill both ways to school.
I’m of the mind that were Nurse to return as Head Coach of the Raptors next season, it wouldn’t harm the team. Toronto could slowly begin to address its weaknesses and fix its issues with him at the helm. He at least in the past was a major proponent of modern NBA offense. With Poeltl in town, Toronto did become a more traditional high pick-and-roll team. Add a few shooters, and the Raptors could look significantly more modern on the offensive end. But it is always easier to implement changes with a new coach. After this season, that could be for the best for everyone involved.
It’s important to note that Nurse leaving the Raptors isn’t a done deal. As Grange theorized with Samson, the right job has to open up. If Nurse doesn’t have a job lined up, he has no motivation to quit, and MSLE — who Grange said is unlikely to eat Nurse’s highest-in-the-league salary — won’t fire him. Which means the two sides might have to just make up and play nice, no matter what the best possible result would be in a vacuum. Nurse would also be on the last year of his contract next season, so they probably don’t make up without an extension, either — if the Raptors do get a new coach, it would be this offseason. If he stays, he probably stays for the foreseeable future. If that does end up being the case, Nurse would have to find a new offensive identity for the team and commit to developing the bottom half of the roster. With or without Nurse, no coach’s tactical brilliance or ability to shift championship games will matter until the team fixes its foundational identity.
