MAD SCIENTIST NURSE CONCOCTS WINNING FORMULAS
Raptors coach spent season experimenting and it’s paying off in playoff adjustments
Experimentation has been a constant theme of the Toronto Raptors’ season. Head coach Nick Nurse said, starting in training camp, he would do a lot of messing about with every part of his team, from starting lineups to player rotations to on-court schemes, all in an effort to figure out optimal strategies that could be deployed in the playoffs.
It became a bit of a running joke, influenced in part by a steady stream of players to the injury list: what crazy combination of players would the Raptors have on the floor this time? When Nurse finally had his full roster healthy, the team was blown up again with the trade deadline move to bring in Marc Gasol and, later, Jeremy Lin, and the loss of four players who had played regular minutes. Suddenly the coach was putting on his lab coat and unpacking his beakers and Bunsen burner again.
By the time the regular season was winding down, and Nurse didn’t want to give potential playoff opponents a preview of anything they might do, he was joking he dialed down “to about a 1.9” on the experimentation scale.
But, funny thing about all that experimentation: it seems to have worked.
As the Raptors prepare for their first NBA Finals, one constant of the playoff run through three series is there haven’t been a lot of constants. The starting lineup has remained the same, and Kawhi Leonard has been great.
But from series to series, the Raptors have altered their style, especially on the offensive end, to suit their opposition. Against the Orlando Magic in the first round, they faced a team that played excellent half-court defence and which was wary of Toronto’s three-point shooting. The Raptors responded with a two-headed attack in the half court led by Leonard and Pascal Siakam. After those two overwhelmed the Orlando defence and the Magic tried to scheme more to stop them, Toronto’s shooters found more space and buried them from beyond the arc.
In the second round the Philadelphia 76ers slowed the game down even more, and their roster full of very large men was able to make things uncomfortable for Toronto’s shooters. Nurse shortened his bench significantly, finishing the series with essentially six guys, and at times used Gasol and Serge Ibaka on the floor together — giants to counter Philadelphia’s giants — even though the two had played all of 37 minutes alongside one another during the regular season. (They yelled defensive assignments at each other in Spanish, and Kyle Lowry would later say no one on either team knew what they were talking about.)
And in the Eastern Conference finals, blown out of Fiserv Forum in Game 2 to fall into an 0-2 series hole, Nurse and his staff thought they noticed something in the second half of that game, even though the result was out of reach: the bench guys could match up against Milwaukee. Lowry also became the second scoring option ahead of Siakam, and the Raptors went back to the ball-movement style that had been their hallmark.
Eight guys averaged more than 20 minutes a game, with Norm Powell and Fred VanVleet, invisible against the Sixers, playing major roles.
“It’s been really wild,” VanVleet said on Tuesday. “As a player you get so used to routine … ‘This is what we do, and do it at a high level, and we don’t care what the other team is doing.’ I think that Nick has kind of changed that where we were adaptable throughout the year.”
With 18 playoff games in the books, the Raptors’ second-most used lineup is comprised of Leonard, Lowry, Ibaka, Powell and VanVleet.
How unusual is that grouping? Those five played five minutes together in the regular season. They shot 33 per cent from the floor, turned the ball over five times and were outscored by eight points. In the playoffs they are plus-26 in 54 minutes.
We tried a lot of things, and sometimes those things didn’t mesh and didn’t make sense. Now, at this point in the season, we’re able to do a lot of different things.
It’s fitting that all this has come after a season of near-constant fiddling.
Nurse deployed 22 different starting lineups this season, 10 more than the Raptors used under Dwane Casey last year. Casey also used the same starters in 52 games last season; Nurse’s most frequent starting lineup was used exactly half as often, 26 times.
VanVleet said the changes weren’t always problem-free.
“We struggled sometimes because of it,” he said. “We tried a lot of things, and sometimes those things didn’t mesh and didn’t make sense. Now, at this point in the season, we’re able to do a lot of different things, and we’ve been through those adversities to prove ourselves.”
All of this could prove useful against the Golden State Warriors, who have been throwing all kinds of unusual looks at their opponents.
VanVleet described the Raptors’ new-found flexibility as “having a lot in your tool box.”
One thing is certain: Whatever happens against the Warriors, Nurse won’t be afraid to put on the lab coat again.