STATE OF THE RAPTORS, ACCORDING TO NURSE
Franchise's most successful coach looks to foster depth, versatile play
Head coach Nick Nurse saw the progress. He saw his Toronto Raptors get better, but it wasn't enough.
Nurse is the most successful coach this franchise has ever known with a career .604 winning percentage in the NBA'S regular season and .610 in the playoffs. Only Dwane Casey is close to either mark.
Losing, regardless of the circumstances of that particular season, is not acceptable.
That's just the way Nurse is wired.
“Masai (Ujiri) and I have a great relationship, I think mostly because we want to win championships,” Nurse said Monday during his year-end review with the local media. “It's about trying to figure out how to win it all, right? That's what I sense he's trying to do every day and that's what I'm trying to do every day. And that's really important, I think that goes a long way in synergy for me.
“He has conversations with me about my coaching and I have conversations with him about the roster, and we're getting ready to have one here and we're going to make some moves to go forward, right? Like, how can we coach better, how can we play or develop better and how can we get the roster better? How can we get better and get to where we want to go? It was a great season, but you know a first-round exit is not what we want to do.”
Nurse put to rest any question that he won't be here next September. He scoffed at those Nurse-to-the-lakers rumours, wondering aloud how those things even get started.
But he made it very clear the same guy who wants to win every game, regardless of the obstacle, is the coach coming back.
“If you're trying to time it out when you think we have another shot to win one,” Nurse said at one point, “well, I'm ready. I'm ready to get back in the hunt. Today.
“So just be clear on that. I coach to win.”
Here is a sampling of Nurse's answers on where the club stands.
Is not having a big-man centre sustainable?
“Each year we are going to have to coach to what the roster kind of shapes into being,” Nurse said. “And sometimes, you're not quite sure when there's a lot of new faces . ... We kind of, maybe not as funky as it turned out, but we knew we were kind of going with this length and deflections and offensive rebounding and switching defence and multiple defence ... we kind of saw that as the vision for the season.
“I don't know, that's who we were this year, we'll see what we look like next year and how that transforms as the year goes on.”
If you keep that approach, how do you get better?
“I really like the length and all that stuff. What I would say is we need to get those guys more versatile,” Nurse said. “We need bigger guys that can guard smaller guys and bigger guys or schemes that can guard bigger guys when there's an extreme at either end.”
What can you do to help keep Fred Vanvleet healthy next season?
“He's a competitive guy, he likes to play, we played him a lot of minutes this year, for sure,” Nurse said. “Trimming (minutes) here and there would probably be advisable, for sure, as we did with Kyle (Lowry). It's always easier said than done. Usually, it was always easier to manage it in the first half so that first halves don't end up at 21 or 22 (minutes) because when you get to there, it gets hard to keep it down to 35 or 36 (minutes), which is where we want to be rather than the upper 30s the way it end(ed) up.
What needs to be added to be better?
“The more quality players you have the better chance you're going to have to win,” Nurse said.
“You can't go into a season with eight or nine guys anymore, you can't. There's COVID that knocks a bunch of guys out and ever-prevalent injuries seem to be way more frequent than I can remember, not just us but around the league. Every time you turn around every game all year long there's like two starters missing from every team and I just don't remember that being the case, like five years ago. So whatever reason that is, it means your ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th guys better be able to go out there and play and not just look like it once and while — they've got to be players. So that would be my first thing, we've gotta get some depth to keep up with the times. We could probably use some catch-and-shoot. I'm still after some more wing players, some more athletic wing players so we can continue to come at you in the style of play we want to come at you with.”
Where can rookie of the year Scottie Barnes make that next step?
“For me, I'm always going to say can you really become a more consistent, somewhat-dominant-type defender?” Nurse said.
“He had stretches this year where he said, `OK, I want to go guard Bradley Beal. I want to go do this, I want to go do that.' More of those . ...
“We're going to watch his scoring skills and shooting skills just increase year by year as we go here. Keep an eye on that and enjoy that.”