Nurse sees San Juan success as springboard

Nick Nurse has been in Milwaukee and Minneapolis, and aside from the travel he’s most certainly got enough on his plate to keep him busy with his primary job.

Yet he spent a bit of last week with one eye on Puerto Rico, keeping up with a basketball team that he hasn’t seen in person in more than a year, and he liked what he saw.

Nurse’s Canadian men’s team — which he wants to lead back to the Olympics for the first time in more than 20 years — earned a berth in the 2022 AmeriCup tournament with two straight wins over the U.S. Virgin Islands. He came away a bit reinvigorated about his second job.

He has every reason to be, actually. A team of unheralded yet committed Canadian players — some working now in Europe, some in the United States, a few training and waiting for the domestic CEBL season to begin — somehow found a way to win two tight games and reaffirm the depth of talent that’s willing to represent the country.

“I think people should be proud of them from that standpoint, I really do,” the Raptors coach said. “Just watch them play.”

The San Juan games — and Canada was supposed to play two others, but the Cuban national team didn’t make to Puerto Rico — qualified the country for the 2022 hemisphere championship, the next step on the road to the 2023 FIBA World Cup.

It was the qualifier to get into the qualifier, and still some of the top Canadian players from Europe left their clubs to go play.

Nurse’s next chance to coach Canada is likely to come at the final Tokyo Olympics qualifier in late June/early July in Victoria, with one berth up for grabs in a six-team tournament.

With the timing and availability of Canadian NBAers, it’s likely that very few of the group that just played in San Juan will play then.