The sound of silence feels weird
Nurse says he might have to use hand signals in quiet of new games
Much of the NBA experience is about stuff on the periphery like the dancers, the mascots, the T-shirt cannons, the cacophony of noise from start to finish.
There was music blaring during the actual game, in-game hosts and hostesses running through myriad contests during timeouts. It was always loud. The noise was always there.
It was sensory overload at times, and the game wasn’t always the thing.
It’s not like that now — and the peace and quiet is weird.
It took Raptors coach Nick Nurse about a minute of his team’s first scrimmage in the relative quiet of an Orlando arena to feel just how different it was.
“Houston lined up in their kind of full-court, after-freethrow formation, and I got up to kind of direct traffic on how to guard that, and I caught myself stopping about halfway through because all 10 players were listening to me, instead of just my five,” Nurse said of an early possession in Toronto’s scrimmage opener Friday against the Rockets. “I think when there’s crowd, music, your guys are used to kind of hearing you.
“That was noticeable, that you maybe are not going to be able to just bark out whatever you want to do, and if you do (everyone is) going to know. They’re going to hear it.”
Nurse joked that he might have to incorporate some of the signalling skills of baseball managers and third-base coaches to get his point across in the relative quiet of the arena now. It’s not likely to get to that point, but it is something the coaching staff is aware of, another unique part of the NBA’s restart they’ll have to figure out.
“I did call some plays. We’ve got kind of a numbering system, and I just kind of sit back and do the numbers. That way you don’t have to say something,” he said.
“But yeah, we’ve talked about thinking about some other ways to try to get some things across.”
No matter what kind of enhanced in-arena plans the league comes up with — such as 300 or so “virtual” fans on the video screens tight to the court, plus piped-in crowd sounds — it will never meet the decibel level of a regular-season game, let alone the non-stop enthusiasm of the playoffs.
It will be odd, and in some ways it might help.
“I kind of think without having fans, it gives you the opportunity to focus a little bit more,” Toronto’s Rondae Hollis-Jefferson said. “Sometimes even when you’re sitting on the bench, not having fans there, it makes you have to focus on everything that’s going on in the game. You get to communicate with your teammates a little more.”
And to have a normal chat without distractions all around.
“It was certainly really comfortable in the timeouts,” Nurse said. “The way you could just express yourself in comfortable conversation … that was nice.
“Instead of trying to talk over the music and the crowds, and the T-shirts flying over your head and all the other stuff that’s going on, you’re just kind of sitting there having a conversation.”
The relative calm also means the players won’t be able to feed off a crowd’s energy or the noise that surrounds them, and that’s going to take some getting used to, as well.
“Obviously it’s an atmosphere we haven’t been in,” said forward Pascal Siakam. “I made a joke that it looks like some of the arenas we wouldn’t play at … there’s nobody there.
“I think we’ve just got to figure out a way to give each other energy, and the bench is going to be important — or whenever you’re on the bench — having that energy to kind of, like, boost your teammates.”