ROOKIE COACH DEMONSTRATES DEFT TOUCH IN GUIDING RAPTORS
Nurse managed series of tough challenges to round team into top form for playoffs
Perhaps there’s an alternative timeline in the world where the Toronto Raptors didn’t fire Dwane Casey.
Masai Ujiri, exercising the patience that had been on display since his team all of a sudden burst into the NBA playoffs a few years ago and then became a reliable 50-win franchise, decided to retain the guy who had just been named Coach of the Year — not a crazy notion, really
— and then waited to see what else happened last summer.
And then LeBron James went to L.A. and the talks with San Antonio turned into the Kawhi Leonard trade and then Casey found himself with a lineup anchored around the kind of players his Raptors teams never had.
Would Casey now be at the head of a team that’s won five straight games in the playoffs, instead of a Detroit Pistons team that went out in four straight?
It’s not hard to imagine. The single biggest reason for Toronto’s 5-1 record this post-season has been the play of Leonard, who has been the all-world defender the Raptors knew they were getting, but has also been the kind of force on the offensive end that Toronto management probably only imagined.
But all of that is hypothetical. And in the actual world in which we live, the guy who is coaching the Toronto Raptors, the guy with the sparkling playoff record, the guy whose post-season swoon lasted all of one game, has so far guided his team with aplomb.
When teams are sometimes accused of generating false hope because they have played a soft schedule, the response is that you can only beat who is in front of you. That’s similar to the early assessment of the job Nick Nurse has done at this point: Yes, he has a bunch of weapons that Casey didn’t have at his disposal. But you can only coach who is in front of you.
Nurse has acknowledged a few times already this post-season that his team is extremely coachable. His starting five has an extraordinary basketball IQ — Kyle Lowry said on Sunday the Raptors could match anyone on that score — and, when coupled with the talents of Leonard and the ascendant Pascal Siakam, sometimes all the head coach has to do is make sure everyone makes it to the bus on time.
But this season hasn’t been without its challenges, especially for a rookie NBA head coach. The Raptors had their injury issues, and they had a season-long Kawhi-management protocol that saw the star miss 22 games.
Then Marc Gasol was brought in at the trade deadline for three rotation players, and Nurse had the delicate task of sending Serge Ibaka to the reserve unit while he was having a tremendous bounce-back season.
Nurse seems to have pulled that off, giving Gasol the starting centre job and still playing Ibaka for heavy minutes, even when he has struggled at times in the relief role.
It’s the kind of roster management that could have blown up in Nurse’s face — and still could — but in Game 1 against he 76ers, Ibaka had some big blocks in the second half and the coach left him out there to close the game. Players notice those kinds of things. Even more impressive has been the way the Raptors starters have become a cohesive unit despite limited opportunities to play together. That group was on the floor together for only about 160 minutes over the whole of the regular season, and it outscored opponents by 14 points. That five has already played 116 minutes together in the playoffs, and is outscoring opponents by 40 points.
Asked on Sunday about using the same starters for six straight games, which was unheard of between October and April, Nurse responded with a joke: “It’s making me uncomfortable.”
But he also said that this was the idea all along. As an organization, the Raptors were committed to an emphasis on the playoffs, even if that sacrificed regular-season continuity. That couldn’t have been easy for a first-year coach trying to follow a 59-win, first seed in the East.
“I don’t know, not much I could do about it, right?,” Nurse said Sunday. “I mean, all the things we were doing, we were planning for this time of year.”
But he also agreed that, as the starters play more together and get more experienced with each other, it’s a huge help.
“I think it’s a key factor with how we’re playing. First of all, defensively there seems to be a lot of connectivity out there,” he said. “I keep saying, when Kawhi and Kyle are playing as hard as they can play, everybody that steps on the floor probably is willing to play hard, too.”
That’s most noticeable on the defensive end, where the Raptors have held opponents to fewer than 100 points in five straight games, a rarity in today’s NBA.
“And offensively, again, I think there’s a lot of good combinations there, and those guys will continue to grow in those packages because they’re spending more time together and they’re figuring out different guys to do different things in similar looks,” Nurse said.
That does make a coach’s job easier. But so far in this season, Nurse has managed the hard stuff well, too. sstinson@postmedia.com Twitter.com/ Scott_Stinson
When Kawhi and Kyle are playing as hard as they can play, everybody that steps on the floor probably is willing to play hard, too.