Nurse just going with the flow
Raptors coach takes pride in his ability to change things on the fly
It’s not like Toronto Raptors coach Nick Nurse makes everything up as each game evolves except that, well, sometimes he does.
Nurse prides himself on his adaptability during the course of a game, and if he has to try a few things early on to see what works best and then change it up from that point, so be it.
It goes for offensive play calls and defensive strategies, it fits in with the versatility of the roster and Nurse’s own creativity.
He’s willing to give something — or two or three things — a try early in a game to figure out what might come in handy if things are close in the dying minutes. That has become ultra-important of late, because all kinds of minor injuries have meant Nurse doesn’t ever seem to have the same core group of 10 or 11 bodies available one night to the next. He might have Kyle Lowry one game but not Kawhi Leonard; Leonard for a couple of games but no Lowry; a Fred VanVleet game and then one without him; a starting frontcourt of Greg Monroe and Pascal Siakam while Serge Ibaka and Jonas Valanciunas are unavailable. Sometimes circumstances dictate that creativity and experimentation are musts.
The other night in Denver was a perfect example, even if the end result wasn’t what the Raptors wanted.
With a lineup decimated by injuries — four of the team’s top seven players sat out — Nurse had to find something that worked, something the Nuggets might not have seen or expected.
“The first three pick-and-rolls of the game were Delon (Wright)-Serge (Ibaka), then the next one was Kawhi (Leonard)-Danny (Green) setting, and then the next one was Ka- whi-Serge. So we were trying to mix ’em up,” Nurse said.
“A lot of times in these games, I’m quickly trying to see how they’re playing it with the different matchups to see what we can put in our pocket for later or how the coverages look and then make our adjustments from there.”
The adaptability, and willingness to experiment early with something they might want to use later in the game, goes for the defensive end as well.
The Raptors might play a cou- ple of possessions of zone defence to give the game a different look and feel in a second quarter and then stash the defence until a key possession or two in the final minutes.
Or if they find it’s not working, they’ll put it away for the night.
“It’s one of those things that just junks up the game and changes the flow of the game,” VanVleet said.
“And if somebody’s rolling and the team’s rolling and we can’t seem to get a stop we’ll probably go to that and see if we can’t mess up their rhythm and maybe force them to take bad shots. The biggest thing is there’s teams that really have trouble taking good shots and sometimes we start to break up a long three or a turnover or whatever.”
Nurse finds that having the players willing to change for no reason than to alter the flow of the game or to take advantage of matchups they didn’t expect to get is half the battle.
If there’s a full buy-in, there’s a better chance at success.