Coach sees a long run for these rivals

Nick Nurse was paying far more attention to the Celtics in the larger sense rather than their recent troubles as he took his Raptors against them last night.

The Toronto coach fully believes his team and the C’s will be confronting each other for a while, which adds a little something to each meeting between the two.

“I mean, this is a really good team,” said Nurse, who moved over a chair to the head position with the Raptors this year after five seasons as an assistant coach. “We know they’re going to be around here in April. We’re going to be playing each other. And this is obviously a good test for us.

“Obviously they’re on edge, but I don’t put too much into that. I think all you need to do is look at last night’s Golden State game (142-111 win in Denver) to know that when a really good team with really good players decided, ‘All right, let’s go play,’ they showed what they can do. And that’s what I’m expecting from Boston.”

As he spoke before tipoff and was asked about which Celts he’d be seeing, Nurse smiled and said, “If I had a formula on any of that stuff, when I knew it was going to happen, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

And the particular matchups and general competitiveness between the two teams always plays into it, as well.

Before the five-game win streak the Raptors carried into the Garden, they were smoked in San Antonio, 125107 (in DeMar DeRozan’s revenge game), but Nurse expects things will always be different for them against the Celts.

“This is a little bit closer to home,” he said. “This is a team we see a lot and we’re going to see a lot, probably for years to come. So we know every time we play these guys that it means something.”

Two weeks ago when the Celts were in San Antonio, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich chalked up the strange results around the league and general inconsistency to greater emphasis by teams on 3-point shooting. Nurse is a believer.

“I buy into it a lot,” he said. “I think that’s why you turn on the games and, I don’t know about you, but I was pretty excited about some of those games, and they were all huge margins. I think the momentum of the 3 — one team making them, the other not — makes those games big spreads. I think teams will go streaky from week to week on the way they’re shooting the ball, and that’ll put them on runs and then runs the other way, as well. So I think he’s bang on with that comment.”

And the issue doesn’t just present itself from game to game, but within games, too. A 20-point lead doesn’t mean what it used to.

“It sure doesn’t,” Nurse said. “And I think, as well, that’s also contributed to what I call parity around the league, too. I think on any night we’ve seen it. We’ve seen teams supposedly at the bottom go on the road and beat teams at the top, and it happens quite frequently now. And I think the 3-point shot has a lot to do with that.”