The Toronto Raptors Wouldn’t Be Champions Without Nick Nurse

After a thrilling whirlwind of a playoff run, the Toronto Raptors are your 2018/2019 NBA Champions – but there’s one man who might deserve quite a bit more celebration than he’s gotten: head coach Nick Nurse.

In the wake of an incredible championship run, it might be worth asking a few questions about who exactly deserves the lion’s share of the credit for such a unique and awe-inspiring season. We all know how important Kawhi Leonard was to the team, and by now the majority of the league is well aware of the fact that Masai Ujiri’s roster-building expertise is second to none. But there might not have been a man more integral to the Toronto Raptors’ fairytale of a season than first-year head coach, Nick Nurse.

If you haven’t been following the Raptors coaching situation all that closely for the past year and a half, then you could be forgiven for not being able to recognize the name; now – following an electrifying promotion from assistant to head coach after the 2017/2018 season that promptly resulted in an unlikely title – you’d better brush up on your knowledge of the NBA’s newest member of the elite coaching ranks.

In a particularly prescient piece from October of 2018 by Evan Rosser of Sportsnet, titled “Ahead of the Class”, NBA champion Nick Nurse (how good does that sound, Raptors fans?!) has his coaching history laid bare; his 30-year, 15-team, five-country career displayed for all to see. The NBA G League and NBA title winner (the first ever coach to win both) provided a resounding answer to a central question posited in the article; namely, could the 51-year old NBA head-coaching rookie translate his wealth of basketball experience into immediate results for a stacked Raptors squad?

Yes. Yes, he could.

And he did.

The newest skipper of the Toronto Raptors also happens to be, perhaps astoundingly, the most successful coach in team history, having led this organization into wholly unfamiliar territory and lived to tell the tale (hold the title?); his ingenuity, locker room leadership, and tireless work ethic led the long woe-begotten franchise to a first-ever Finals berth and, subsequently, an NBA championship.

24 years in the making.

It is true that Nurse inherited a veteran-laden roster, and that he was not solely responsible for initiating the culture shift that has been sweeping over Toronto for the past six years (that, dear readers, can be attributed to the now-legendary stylings of president Masai Ujiri and general manager Bobby Webster).

Dwayne Casey, the 2017/2018 NBA Coach of the Year (the very man that Nurse replaced), deserves much of the credit for laying the groundwork of this now championship-level franchise. Casey, unfortunately, couldn’t take the Raptors to the promised land – but he sure did loosen the lid on the metaphorical ketchup bottle that is a first-ever franchise title.

Nonetheless, in his first season at the helm of this expectation-loaded Raptors team, Nick Nurse delivered. There’s no clearer truth. He ensured the championship coronation of a roster that, while supremely talented, had little time to gel on the floor.

With the weight of Kawhi Leonard’s impending free agency weighing on his shoulders all season, mixed with having to develop chemistry, overcome nagging injuries to key roster members, and manage various players’ workloads, it seemed unlikely at the outset of the playoffs that the Raptors’ all-in approach to the season would (with or without Nurse) end with champagne showers.

Yet, Nurse refused to stop overcoming the odds; it’s all he’s ever known. Given the hand he was dealt, and the very real threat of organizational fallout that would have followed a lost season looming over him, it’s fairly easy to say that the reading on Nurse’s pressure gauge this year fluctuated between ‘immense’ and ‘unbelievable.’ Nick took that pressure and made diamonds.

You know, the kind that adorns championship rings.

Nurse was known to be a tactical tinkerer from his days spent coaching abroad, and his deep bag of tricks came to be a signature saving grace of the 2018/2019 postseason; from properly employing Playoff Powell against the Milwaukee Bucks to help swing the Eastern Conference Finals, to platooning Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka at the five to provide a dominant 1-2 punch in post matchups, Nurse has pushed all the right buttons at all the right times for this team.

The positive personnel decisions go on. His willingness to play Fred VanVleet and Kyle Lowry at the same time in a bite-sized backcourt proved pivotal in securing the title over the Warriors and running roughshod over the East. Unlike Casey, Nurse urged the development of Pascal Siakam into a high-usage perimeter and low-post playmaker, thus providing even more opportunities for Toronto’s pick-your-poison offense to tear apart opposing defenses.

Employing the rarely used box-and-one defense to great effect on Stephen Curry only further demonstrated the extent of Nurse’s basketball IQ and willingness to (pardon the pun) think outside the box.

Nurse wholeheartedly embraced the organizational focus on load management, working closely with the Raptors’ director of sports science, Alex McKechnie, to ensure that his star players were good to go under the bright lights of the postseason.

The success of that strategy cannot be overstated; the Raptors, despite resting their best player (Leonard) for 22 regular season games, finished with only one less win (58) than the regular season record they set last season under Casey (59 wins).

One less regular season win, and four impressive series victories over arguably three of the top five title-threats in the league (those being the Golden State Warriors, Bucks, and Philadelphia 76ers). In league circles, they call that a tremendous upgrade.

Of all the various different aspects of being a successful head coach in today’s NBA, there is one field where Nurse simply had Casey’s number; tenure and past NBA success be damned. That particular area was the willingness to adapt.

The NBA, much like life itself, is a constantly changing environment that demands introspection self-initiated renovation in order to precipitate success. Casey, by all indications, had worn out his playbook.

While he was starting to embrace the three-point shot, he was insistent on continuing to play lineups with limited spacing, and his roster was woefully ill-equipped to defend as staunchly as he would have liked.

He was deemed (by ownership and executive-level management) either unwilling or unlikely to substantially alter his play-calling and rotation management after Toronto’s tragic sweep at the hands of Cleveland last season. Casey had taken the franchise far, but he could not take them any further.

The hemming and hawing over the dismissal of Casey, despite him winning the NBA’s 2017/2018 Coach of the Year award, gripped the city of Toronto at the start of last summer. The exact shortfalls of Casey’s tenure and more reasons as to why the Raptors looked for a change in leadership can be found here in an excellent, insightful piece by Sportsnet’s Michael Grange.

Bottom line: Toronto needed an innovator. They needed a winner. They needed someone who had been around the block; who would value the position they were coming into, and understand the significance and nuance involved with the timing of such a move. But most importantly, they needed someone from the inside.

Someone who already knew how the franchise operated and was firmly committed to the organizational ethos.

The Raptors needed a head coach capable of not only continuing the tradition of excellence initiated by Casey but of lifting it into the rafters of Scotiabank Arena; immortalizing the transformation of a franchise that once inhabited the dregs of the league into an NBA champion.

Now – one season later – after carrying out the vision set forth by Masai and delivering a first-ever NBA title to a city starving for basketball acclaim, the result is all too clear.

They got their man in Nick Nurse.