Nurse has just about seen it all
Coach inherits a 59-win team with some championship aspirations
TORONTO — Stories? You want stories? Nick Nurse stories? There are a few.
How about the time he coached a team that lived all together in a tricked-out mansion in Manchester, England, down the road from this guy named David Beckham? The players got paid handsomely, life was pretty darn good and even as the party raged on to celebrate a championship victory, ownership was figuring out how soon it could shut the doors on the whole escapade.
“We had a beautiful arena, we had a great team, I often wonder if that would have rolled, how long I would have stayed there,” Nurse says.
“It was amazing,” adds current Raptors assistant Phil Handy, a member of that Manchester team. “We had maids that came in twice a week, we had our compound but everyone had their own privacy. It was really unique.
“Nick was a lot younger, he would practice with us from time to time, he was just a good coach.”
Or how about that time in Brighton with the Bears when his team decided to sign Dennis Rodman — mostly because Rodman had done a star turn on some B List season of Celebrity Big Brother — and Nurse had to deal with that inherent craziness.
“Yeah, that was pretty crazy,” he says. “They were so intrigued … like 30 million a night, the whole country was watching it. It was pretty interesting. It was really cool. We had like eight security people just to get him in the place. It was something.”
Or how about cutting his coaching teeth with some outfit called the Derby Storm where, according to highly respected and time-worn British basketball writer Mark Woods he was “paid buttons to be player-coach for a team in a leisure centre” which is about as far from a National Basketball Association arena as you can get.
“Lots of stories,” Nurse admits. “Lots of good stories.”
And all part of the journey that has led the 51-year-old native of Iowa to the pinnacle of his career, owner of one of 30 jobs like it on Earth — NBA head coach of a Toronto Raptors team about to embark on its first season with him at the helm.
A series of experiences — good, bad, weird, funny — that have gotten him to this point.
“Been a ride, right?” he says. Because we are all products of our past, and because lessons learned in our youth form the basis of later life, Nurse has taken those fun times, those hard times, those up-and-down times and turned them into a collaborative coaching style in which he’s quite comfortable taking bits and pieces from the past to create the present.
“One of the other things I love about him is he’s open to learning, open to trying to get stuff from different coaches, different people and trying to get our insight, our opinions and open to taking what we have to say,” Raptors forward Danny Green said. “That helps us all get on the same page.”
There is no doubt there’s a large measure of pressure on Nurse has he takes command of the Raptors after spending four seasons as an assistant to the deposed — and universally-respected — Dwane Casey.
Nurse inherits a 59-win team with legitimate championship aspirations, a good team that he has to make into a great one and it will not be an easy task. But all that he’s been through in two decades as a head coach at every imaginable level and years in the NBA should conspire to give him every chance at success.
He comes across as easy going but you know a competitive fire burns within. He understands the task at hand and is ready to accept the responsibility; it’s what he’s been building toward since those years in Britain.
“He’s confident, knows what he wants to do,” Kyle Lowry said. “That’s the word: confidence.
“He has his own personality, his own way he wants to do it, the way he wants to get it done.”
One of the things that made Raptors president Masai Ujiri hire Nurse over a handful of other applicants was Nurse’s ability to make quick decisions in the heat of a game.
“If you ask what my philosophy is, my philosophy is kind of like an entrepreneurial philosophy,” Nurse said.
“An entrepreneur will do whatever they have to do to make sure things get done. Our coaches will be that way, our players will be that way. Just do what it takes. Esthetically, let’s move the ball, let’s guard people, let’s fight. That’s basically it.”
All gleaned from a long history at all kinds of different levels.