For a long time, the fruit of Toronto’s coaching tree grew in lands far and wide. Two of Nick Nurse’s assistants became head coaches in far-flung cities; Chris Finch in Minnesota and Nate Bjorkgren in Indianapolis. Head coaches of the Raptors 905 like Jama Mahlalela received promotions to join other teams — the Golden State Warriors for Mahlalela. Others, like Jerry Stackhouse, became successful NCAA coaches. Still others became the seeds of coaching talent that helped grow the Canadian Elite Basketball League, including Ryan Schmidt, Charles Kissi, Charles Dube-Brais, Arsalan Jamil, and Will Rooney — all helping spread basketball across Canada. Adrian Griffin, former lead assistant under Nurse, is the new head coach of the readymade championship contender Milwaukee Bucks.
Some of that former success has turned to ash.
Bjorkgren was run out of town after reports about, among other things, a very concerning dress policy, and very little relationship-building. It perhaps should have been more concerning in hindsight when Nurse and the Raptors welcomed him back with open arms the following season, first as a consultant, then as an assistant coach once again.
And now Nurse is going to be the head coach of the Philadelphia 76ers. If Toronto has a rival, it is probably the 76ers. Two of Toronto’s era-defining shots came against the Sixers — Vince Carter’s miss in 2001 and Kawhi Leonard’s make in 2019. Toronto also played its most recent playoff series against the Sixers, losing in six. And now the most successful coach in franchise history, with a championships as well as two of the four best seasons by winning percentage, will be the coach of the Sixers.
Griffin will be the coach of the Bucks. Maybe you don’t think the Sixers are Toronto’s rival? Milwaukee would be a pretty good alternate suggestion. Toronto has faced the Bucks twice in the playoffs, winning in 2017 and in 2019. Kawhi Leonard’s dunk on the Lowry pitchback in transition remains perhaps my personal favourite basketball moment of all time.
Meanwhile, Toronto has almost no one with certainty on the coaching staff. Jim Sann and Rico Hines will reportedly remain on staff — both are highly respected player development experts. Beyond that there are only questions, rumours, and the demand for patience. There’s truly no rush for Toronto. Masai Ujiri set his deadline as the draft for when to get someone hired, and there’s no reason why he should move that up. None of the major candidates, outside of Griffin, have been hired elsewhere. There’s no reason to rush, and plenty of reason to wait — to see which other coaches become available.
That’s the future though — the past is finished when it comes to the once-effortless gleam of Toronto’s coaching staff.
Toronto’s coaching tree isn’t so much dead and buried as it is transplanted. The Raptors have spent years graduating coaches to new gigs and spreading the seeds of the tree far and wide. That benefits the team and and the league around it — giving prestige and soft power to organizations and their employees. But Toronto sees no benefit now. The ground is cleared and ready for future growth. Start again from square one.
The Nurse regime may not have ended well, but the five years Toronto had him in the coach’s chair cannot be thrown away. They were phenomenal. Nurse won a championship as a rookie head coach and innovated defensively to the extent that much of the league began defending post players with some of his principles. He came to Toronto with an offensive identity, in particular because of his 3-point-happy tenure with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, and he’s leaving Toronto as one of the founding parents of the modern era. The possession-hacking stuff? It turned into a gimmick for Toronto — largely because the team didn’t have a strong base to support the pillars — but many teams adopted it around the league.
Perhaps the most ironic lesson of the Nurse era in Toronto is that the Raptors helped build the future of the league, which resulted in them living in the past. Shooting and rim pressure — significant innovations in the 2010s, if not earlier — were Toronto’s downfall. The Raptors became the NBA’s version of Tesla: possessing flashy and hypermodern features, with a busted foundation.
Nurse also helped show the value of old school relationship-building. Relationships are one of the key reasons why Griffin was hired in Milwaukee. Nurse may be a genius — and he really is when it comes to basketball — but over the last few years his players have seemed to not really get along with him. There’s been more than one fight with players behind closed doors. That’s life — coaches usually have a shelf life in this league, and Nurse lasted a relatively long time before the friction mattered more than the rest.
Whomever Toronto hires next, they’ll have to possess a number of qualities that Nurse had in spades. Nurse has long had some of the best clipboard kung fu in the NBA — Toronto leaped from 14th in average points per possession to 4th in after-timeout points per possession. The Raptors may have vomited on themselves in the play-in game against the Chicago Bulls, but they also scored 2.0 points per possession in after-timeout situations in that game. Nurse remains one of the best Xs and Os tacticians in the league, both in the big picture and the small. Toronto will hope whomever it hires can reproduce that.
And eventually, if Toronto’s lucky, it can rebuild its coaching tree. Trees can be transplanted. They can be regrown from a single sapling, a single seed. Who knows? Eric Khoury will, in all likelihood, remain within the franchise’s umbrella. Perhaps he becomes the future star, if not this coaching cycle, then the next. Assistants will eventually earn promotions with other teams, some will even become head coaches elsewhere. If all goes well, innovations in team strategy will even shift how other teams play.
But the foundation has to be rebuilt. Relationships repaired, the locker room made into a place of comradery and fellowship once again. Toronto should see the hirings of Nurse and Griffin as both successes and failures. The team had a highly regarded and sought-after coaching staff. And yet it still couldn’t make it work. We’ll see how they fare for their respective championship-hunting franchises.
Nurse and Griffin did wonderful things in Toronto, and they should be applauded for that. But now it’s time for something new. Whatever that is, if the new regime can cobble together most of the success that Nurse and Griffin did before the locker room fell apart, it will be considered a smashing success.
