With seed secure, options arise
Nurse may opt to rest players — or go all out against No. 1 Bucks
Now the Raptors really get to play around if they want to.
A 108-99 win over the Memphis Grizzlies on Sunday sealed their Eastern Conference fate, and rendered the final three seeding games moot for a Toronto team that will begin defence of its NBA title as the No. 2 seed when the playoffs open in a week.
And even with a juicy game against the top-seeded Milwaukee Bucks on tap Monday night, Toronto coach Nick Nurse knows he’s playing with house money.
“I would say my gut feeling today is we have played pretty heavy minutes, we have done what we kind of needed to do, and went 4-1 to get this thing to where we needed it to be,” Nurse said after Toronto reached 50 wins for the fifth season in a row.
“I would say you will see a little bit of everything in the last three games as far as lots of guys playing up and down the roster, some guys not playing, some guys playing limited minutes.”
Perhaps Serge Ibaka gets one game off, as does Marc Gasol. Maybe Fred VanVleet sits one and Kyle Lowry rests for another.
But maybe Nurse will stay entirely true to form and play each game as it comes, and decide in the heat of the night what’s best for which player.
That seems to be how he rolls, but a bit of rest makes sense since everything for the Raptors and the Bucks is settled. Milwaukee will be No. 1 in the East and Toronto will be No. 2, while Brooklyn and Orlando fight it out for seventh and eighth to determine the firstround playoff matchups.
Nurse hurried away from his post-game interview session to scout — Orlando played immediately after Toronto on Sunday, while Brooklyn had the late game — so he is looking longterm.
Going into Milwaukee-Toronto, the talk is sure to be about how the game really means nothing and neither team is going to show its deepest held strategic moves, but that’s not entirely true.
Once the ball goes up and they’re keeping score, games do mean something because there’s a winner and a loser. And while neither team will throw out new wrinkles for any length of time, getting some live practice for short stints to see what works — and what doesn’t — will come in handy in the future. Besides, life on the NBA campus is unlike any experience these teams have ever had, so making generalizations is foolish.
“I’d like to make a determination, but as with everything in this bubble, in this scenario, it seems to be ever-changing for whatever reason,” Nurse said.
It would be different, perhaps, if the Raptors were chasing 50 wins — a significant total over a season in which they’ll play only 72. But that goal has been reached for the fifth straight time, a point of pride for the players.
“We always have confidence as us, as a team … we defend. We have players who can do many things on offence, (but) we know when you defend in this league you have a chance to win,” Ibaka said. “That’s where we get our confidence.”