Nurse’s plan for Harden worked ... to a degree
STAR HELD TO 23 POINTS, BUT RAPTORS LOSE
Hate the result, but don’t waste time second guessing the process. Nick Nurse is the coach he is and the Raptors are the team they are at least in part because of Nurse’s willingness to try anything.
And Thursday night, Nurse was willing to try something.
With James Harden in town and coming off a 50 point night and a 60 point night in his past two games, Nurse rolled the dice with a defensive scheme Harden hasn’t seen to date. The Raptors have had variations of doubling superstars at times and getting the ball out of their hands this season with plenty of success, but this was different.
This was Harden being doubled almost as soon as he crossed the logo.
And rather than take it off and switch things up intermittently, Nurse stuck with it for basically the full 48 minutes.
Harden attempted just 11 field goals and made seven of them. He got to the line for just six free throw attempts. Both the field goal attempts and free throws are season lows. His 23 points on the night are his second worst output of the season.
All things considered, the strategy worked.
But the Raptors still lost and because of that Twitter and social media, as only those vehicles are capable of, were killing Nurse for trying something like this.
Never mind that Ben Mclemore, who was a combined 3- for14 from three in two exhibition games against Toronto earlier this year in Japan, suddenly looked like Klay Thompson hitting a career best 8- of-17 from distance. That’s a career 35 per cent threepoint shooter getting red-hot. The Raptors were willing to accept that risk.
The Raptors did not win and that meant the strategy was a dumb one in some minds.
Such short- minded thinking, really.
Attempts like these are the way teams get better. Nurse knows it and his players know it too.
It’s what the team has come to expect of their head coach and one of the big reasons he has the respect of the room. He’s not afraid.
Recall last June when Nurse broke out the box-and-one defence against a Warriors team that had Steph Curry healthy and little else.
The response was borderline ridicule. Curry called it “Janky.” Others sneered this was something they hadn’t used since grade school.
Nurse’s response?
He went back to it again and again. Eventual world champion Spain, with Nurse’s assistant Sergio Scariolo at the helm, used it in their title run.
Ridicule or scorn doesn’t affect Nurse. He’s willing to take the hit to find something that works and confident enough not to care if it doesn’t.
It’s something his players love about him.
“It shows the type of person he is, his character, that’s he’s not scared to try some things and I think it’s fun to be around someone like that who is always experimenting and doing what might be out of the norm,” Pascal Siakam said after the game.
It’s also exactly what Nurse promised when he was first named head coach two summers ago.
The fact that this particular attempt didn’t result in a win doesn’t mean you won’t see it again. The Raptors visit Houston on April 5 and expect Nurse to try something similar with perhaps a tweak or two.
Nurse certainly wasn’t feeling any regret about this particular experiment.
“I think it was pretty good,” he said. “It wasn’t great, but it was pretty good. We just weren’t good enough in some of the other areas. I talked about that in pre- game. Against this team, 50 3’s are going to go up. What did they shoot, 55? There are 33 long rebounds there. … We’ve got to race those down a little bit.”
The scheme meant a lot of running around for both Fred VanVleet, who became the second trapper as soon as Harden got to the logo on the floor to join either OG Anunoby or Norm Powell and leaving his own man, and Siakam. But Harden was a willing passer all night and that meant scrambling back to his man.
Siakam was on the move defensively all night as well leaving his man to cover the middle when Vanvleet ran out to double on Harden and then recovering as they got the ball out of Harden’s hands.
Siakam sounded a little surprised they kept it up the whole game and suggested next time around it might be better utilized intermittently.
No one was complaining when Nurse and his staff were coming up with unorthodox lineups to get through the 11 games they were without Kyle Lowry and Serge Ibaka, so to start whining about it now when a good idea worked to a point but didn’t quite get the intended result is hypocritical.