NURSE SET FOR NEXT ROUND OF CHALLENGES
Headed into his third season as head coach, Toronto's bench boss has seen a lot already
Nick Nurse has shown plenty of resolve and tenacity during his first two years on the job with the Toronto Raptors.
The reigning NBA coach of the year has a championship ring, and might have had another much deeper playoff run at another had the bubble experience not bitten into a once-formidable crew. With the first pre-season game on the schedule Saturday night in Charlotte in his third year on the job, Nurse is looking at his third challenge, this one no more like last year's than the one before it.
In his first season, Nurse was graced with a mostly veteran group that only got a little wiser and experienced midway through the season with the addition of Marc Gasol.
He already had the unexpected bonus of lucking into one of the elite players in the game on his roster, if only for one season.
Last year it was all about proving they were still an elite team even without that elite game breaker in Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green.
What the bubble experience taught everyone in Toronto was the lack of room for error — or in this case, drop off — without those extra veteran bodies around.
A very successful year lost a lot of its lustre when the Raptors failed to get out of the second round. But now Nurse has yet another battle to fight, this one overcoming the loss of two more cogs in his rotation with the unexpected departures of both Serge Ibaka and Gasol.
The Raptors expected to hang on to one of those bigs along with the must-have re-signing of Fred Vanvleet, which they handled nicely. But like Nurse in his daily coaching decisions, the front office led by Masai Ujiri and Bobby Webster has always been quick to adapt to changing circumstances.
When Ibaka jumped to the
L.A. Clippers and, right behind him, Gasol settled on the Lakers, the roster-makers went out and lured the best of the remaining free-agent big men in Aron Baynes and then brought in Alex Len, hoping to unlock some of his still untapped potential.
Nurse still retained four fifths of this starting rotation from a year ago and it looks likely — Nurse said as much himself on Thursday — that Baynes will plug in nicely there at centre with those returning four.
The real task is going to be production behind that first unit.
On that front, Nurse has returning vet Norman Powell and — assuming he's still with the team after the fallout from his alleged assault charges — Terence Davis.
Matt Thomas made some huge strides following the shutdown, showing a much more expanded game than he had earlier. In addition to being one of the most deadly shooters from just about anywhere on the court, spotted up or on the move — which he has been since he arrived in the league — Thomas has turned himself into one of the better players moving without the ball, cutting fast and hard into open lanes and forcing teams to scramble to account for him.
Defensively, there seems to be a new respect for his game at that end of the floor, but that remains in the very early stages.