Rotations aren’t just for the players
Nurse keeps assistant coaches on their toes by giving them varying responsibilities
It’s not just figuring out playing rotations that Toronto Raptors coach Nick Nurse has on his plate early in this NBA season.
He’s also figuring how and when to rotate his top three assistant coaches.
It certainly doesn’t change as often as his substitution pattern of players does but Nurse is finding out just how his assistants will be deployed later in the year when the games matter a bit more with the post-season approaching.
He’s divided the responsibilities into three categories — offence, defence and what he calls “special teams” that encompass out-of-bounds plays, trick defences, after-timeout play calls and sundry other, well, special plays.
He’s got his top three lieutenants — Adrian Griffin, Sergio Scariolo and Nate Bjorkgren — rotating through stretches of about 10 games in each of the disciplines and, eventually, Nurse will settle on consistent job descriptions.
“We have kind of roughly planned it out but it’s not in stone,” Nurse said of the 10-game chunks. “It’s just an idea and when it gets close to that time we start thinking about who’s going to rotate where and all of those kind of things.
“And it’s like our rotations a little bit on the floor. We monitor which ones … when it gets down to the end of the year and playoff time we’re going to go with what we think is our best lineup.”
Until then, though, having different coaches do different things for different periods of time keeps everyone fresh.
Each assistant gets to run the practice time for whatever aspect of the game he’s handling — prepractice film, on-court work, post-game video compilation — and sharing means no one gets locked into one part of the game.
“What went into it was, first of all, just developing all our coaches, that they don’t just get stuck over in a corner of defence, offence or special teams or player development or whatever it is and try to develop them,” Nurse said.
“Two was just to give them a chance to be more objective, right? So when I’m asking them for advice on things that they’re a little bit more objective rather than like, for instance, if I was the offensive coach that I would say, ‘Play all the shooters all the time,’ you know what I mean? Or if you were the defensive coach you’d say, ‘Play all the defenders all the time’ and if you’re the special teams coach say ‘He’s got to be in because he’s our best inbounder.’
“Hopefully it’s to make us a little bit more objective but mostly the learning and developing the coaches and give them a chance to really hone their craft in all the areas.”
The Raptors are down an assistant this week because Scariolo is off doing his other job as the head coach of the Spanish national team as it plays Turkey and Ukraine in the next FIBA World Cup qualification window.
Not only does it allow Scariolo to stay with a team he loves and has had great success with, it’s a bit of a professional development week for him. He’ll see a handful of players and some tactics and game situations that might one day come in handy for the Raptors.
Nurse knows how important that is, having served as an assistant with the Great Britain national team that played at the 2012 London Olympics.
“I didn’t really think, ‘oh, I did it’ or anything like that but I did understand,” he said.
“Going through that, for me, you keep a good pulse on players around the world, you keep a good pulse on trends, offensively, defensively, always you’re seeing something a little different, something that they’ll do.
“It’s nice to be able to have a close ally so that we can incorporate something.”
“Hopefully it’s to make us a little bit more objective.” NICK NURSE ON HIS SYSTEM OF ROTATING ASSISTANT COACHES