RAPTORS HIRE FROM WITHIN
Nick Nurse, an assistant under Dwane Casey, takes over as head coach.
You can say one thing for sure about the first coaching change of Masai Ujiri’s five-year run atop the Raptors: It was not a bloodless transfer of power, nor a friendly one. On Monday, Dwane Casey was hired as coach of the Detroit Pistons, one month to the day he was fired by the Raptors after seven mostly magical years in Toronto. On Tuesday, Nick Nurse emerged as Ujiri’s choice to replace Casey. And as those significant life events were unfolding, it’s safe to say the two men were not toasting each other’s good fortune with champagne and congratulatory repartee. Forget their five largely successful years together on the Raptors bench. Forget that it was Casey who gave Nurse his first NBA opportunity, hiring him out of the developmental league back in 2013. Multiple NBA sources will tell you the one-time mentor and his long-time assistant have not been on affable terms in the midst of Toronto’s coaching-staff shakeup. Maybe nobody’s been in a good mood in Raptorland since the season came to its crushing end.
“No love lost between ’em,” said one basketball lifer who would know, speaking of Casey and Nurse.
Not that they won’t make nice for public consumption when they take to their respective lecterns at introductory press conferences. Not that anyone should expect NBA coaches enter this cutthroat, money-oozing business to make friends. The 50-year-old Nurse, a former coaching journeyman who spent years toiling in the obscurity of the British league before he began his rise to the NBA, will surely be achieving a longtime goal when he’s introduced this week as the ninth coach in Raptors history and one of just 30 NBA head coaches on the planet. If he had to fray his relationship with one of the most beloved personalities in recent Toronto sports history in becoming what he’s become — maybe that’s the price of success.
Given that Casey, 61, also still counts himself among the exclusive 30-man NBA coaching fraternity, perhaps it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the old colleagues will eventually bury the hatchet. Until then, alert The Ringer to fire up the burner-account detector. Now we got bad blood. At the very least, we could also have an awfully compelling Raptors-Pistons playoff series next spring.
Whatever the case, the Bay Street palace intrigue will be a footnote by the time Nurse gets around to coaching his first game (unless his first game is against the Pistons). Which doesn’t mean Nurse’s arrival won’t be met with a skeptical eye.
Toronto’s Plan A, don’t forget, was Mike Budenholzer, whose brief interaction with Ujiri ended with Budenholzer taking Milwaukee’s head-coaching job (and a timely ESPN report that the Raptors didn’t offer Budenholzer theirs). Plan B was a month-long coaching search that saw Ujiri interview a hefty list of candidates, among them four-year Spurs assistant Ettore Messina, who was the finalist in what became a two-man race with Nurse.
Hiring the 58-year-old Messina, who built a reputation as one of Europe’s sharpest tacticians during his run to four Euroleague championships as a head coach, would have been an intriguing, bold choice. Hiring the guy who has spent five years sitting beside Toronto’s head coach — after insisting Toronto’s problem against the Cavaliers in the playoffs was coaching — is something less than that.
Not that Nurse doesn’t deserve a good, long chance to prove himself; that goes without saying, and he’ll get it. But it’s worth wondering what measurable new value Nurse can bring to the situation. He was clearly empowered as the team’s offensive co-ordinator. He took an in-season victory lap when U.S.-based writers pointed to Toronto’s newly designed offence — which Nurse got credit for authoring — as the key to an unexpected performance bump that saw the Raptors win the East’s No. 1 seed for the first time in franchise history. But if Nurse was calling out the magic adjustments necessary to beat LeBron James — if he had the answers that could have halted that ugly Cleveland sweep — nobody seemed to be listening.
One league source suggested that on a bench occupied by the defence-first Casey and defensive co-ordinator Rex Kalamian, Nurse’s offence-forward suggestions were never fully heard nor under- stood. So that’s the argument for making the change. Nurse, the line of thinking goes, couldn’t be the innovator he’s capable of being with an oldschool head coach at the wheel. If that’s true we’ll only know the extent of Nurse’s talents when he’s fully strapped into the driver’s seat. Nurse’s supporters expect he’ll find a way to hold players accountable in a ways Casey couldn’t. Wish him luck, because he’ll need it.
Following Casey won’t be easy, especially if Ujiri doesn’t back up the coaching switch with a swapping out of key players. You can always nitpick strategy, sure. But higher on the list of the franchise’s prob- lems reside two all-stars who’ve been chronic postseason underperformers and a roster that’s repeatedly bumped its collective head against its competitive ceiling.
What are the odds Nurse can deliver a perceptible upgrade on Casey? And does Nurse have the requisite presence to command the daily stage afforded to an NBA head coach? There are no shortage of doubters.
Still, maybe Nurse shouldn’t be underestimated. He has just been rewarded for having the wits to convince Ujiri he’s worth betting on.
Soon enough he’ll get a chance to prove it.