Raptors coach puts focus on life first, then basketball
Hoops taking a back seat to the struggle for racial equality throughout the world
Nick Nurse has an NBA championship to defend, a roster to get back in shape after an unprecedented mid-season threemonth layoff and the prospect of convincing 17 somewhat spoiled athletes that three months in a confined area of Orlando is not worth whining about on his to-do list.
But all of that is taking a back seat to the struggle for racial equality that is consuming the world.
On a conference call on Tuesday, Nurse openly admitted the vast majority of his meetings either with his players, his staff, fellow league coaches and league representatives is dominated with talk of ridding society of the pervasive racism that came to a head when George Floyd, who was Black, died after pleading that he couldn’t breathe while a white police officer held him down with a knee on his neck.
“There’s been like very little, if any at all, talk about basketball,” Nurse said of his interactions with team personnel of late.
“I think we must have had four team-wide calls with the team before we got to a quick 10-minute one yesterday to say this is the possible restart. We’ve just given you kind of a headsup here, but we’ve really been entrenched in the issue. Again, making sure everyone’s OK, everyone’s safe, listening to their ideas and thoughts, etc.”
It’s a strange time to be doing anything else, really, given how wide-reaching and all-consuming the protests and marches have been all over the continent and throughout the world.
“As tragic as all these recent events (have been), this has been going on for a long time. There is a historic opportunity to make some lasting change and I think we all have to take part in that,” Nurse said.
Nurse believes there is plenty of time to get everyone up to speed and locked in for basketball when it officially resumes with games on July 31. The Raptors are still in the decision-making stage of where and when their own pre-training camp period begins.
“We’ve made plans on both sides of the border, just for doing it as safe as possible, that’s kind of our first and foremost priority,” Nurse said. “We’re going to hopefully be in the Disney situation for quite a while, so we’ve got to take that into consideration, as well.”
Disney is the venue where the league will conclude the season, beginning with eight regular season games followed by a full slate of playoffs.
Nurse and his team will get there in the first week of July and if all goes according to plan, won’t leave until they have defended their championship on or around Oct. 12.
Nurse says he is very much in favour of the return-to-play plan, mostly because it sticks as closely to the traditional NBA way of doing things as much as possible amid a pandemic.
“I like most of the simplicity of it,” Nurse said. “I like East versus West, I think people are used to that. I like (best-of ) seven, every round being played out to its fullest, people are used to that.”
Nurse can take some comfort in knowing he has a mostly veteran roster that knows what it takes to win a championship.
However, that will get a little lost with all the games taking place in one location and over the course of almost 2 1/2 months, and that’s after the training camp period.
He anticipates having to do a lot of adjusting on the fly, but that happens to be one of Nurse’s greatest strengths. Even so, he knows there are going to be lots of first-time scenarios he’ll have to navigate.
“Your attitude day-to-day is going to get challenged in a different way, so how are you going to be able to — for lack of a better word — keep people from just complaining?” Nurse asked. “‘Man, it’s too hot, the sun’s out,’ or, ‘it’s too cold, the air-conditioning’ — whatever. You’re going to have to try to keep an extra positive attitude for starters and you’re going to have to go with the flow a little bit, and understand going in that this is going to be different.”
That all said, Nurse likes his team’s chances now just as he did before this pandemic shut the world down for a spell.
“I mean, we are right in the same position that we were a year ago going into it,” Nurse said of the low expectations.
“Nobody was talking about us — ‘Yeah, they got a decent team up there’ — but they weren’t really talking about us as a serious threat, and long may it continue. We are looking forward to it.”