Raptors coach stays one step ahead of opponents
With just under five minutes left in Wednesday’s playoff game against the Brooklyn Nets, Nick Nurse inserted Pascal Siakam back into the lineup in place of Serge Ibaka.
The Toronto Raptors, having finally surged ahead after trailing most of the game, were trying to hold on to a five-point lead. The removal of Ibaka, who joined an ice-cold Marc Gasol on the bench, left the Raptors without a true centre on the floor, exposing them to a potential mismatch against Brooklyn’s Jarrett Allen, who is listed at not quite seven feet tall but is easily so with the hair.
Within seconds, Allen finished off an easy dunk as Siakam watched helplessly. The lead was cut to three.
A lot of coaches would have called timeout right there and switched things up again. For all of Nurse’s many and varied defensive schemes, sometimes Give the Ball to the Tallest Guy is a hard play to stop if you are giving away a lot of size.
But the Raptors stuck with it. The head coach would say afterward that pulling Ibaka had been a tough call, as he was part of the group — along with Norm Powell, OG Anunoby, Kyle Lowry and Fred VanVleet — that had wrested control of the game in the late stages. But Siakam is an all-star now, one of the main guys on the defending champs if not quite The Guy. In crunch time, as Nurse explained, “you don’t usually let those guys sit.”
The small Toronto lineup would manage to see out the game. It wasn’t a thing of beauty, but they played the Nets even over the closing stretch and held on for the 104-99 win. Siakam, in that unfamiliar spot, at one point read a lob pass to Allen for what would have been another easy dunk and he reached out to pick it off for a key turnover.
Nurse and his staff have been praised widely for the versatility that has helped make the Raptors the second-ranked defence in the NBA in this weirdest of seasons, and indeed there are all kinds of schemes and looks that the Raptors will throw at an opponent.
But Nurse in his second year has also proven to be a fearless lineup changer, willing to make unusual substitutions at odd times, the kind that would expose a head coach to second guessing if they don’t work. In Game 1 against the Nets on Monday, he replaced an ineffective Powell with Terence Davis, a rookie with no playoff experience. Davis scored 11 points in 12 minutes in the Toronto win. In Game 2, with Powell rolling, Davis didn’t get off the bench.
Gasol, who has been excellent for much of this season, was visibly frustrated in Game 2, seemingly annoyed that a procession of smaller Nets were bumping and swatting him whenever he touched the ball. He didn’t play at all in the fourth quarter.
And so, Nurse went small. Bold, but it worked. After the game, I asked him what goes into making those decisions on the fly.
“It’s all feel,” he said. “I’m trying to get my five guys who are playing the best out there at the end of the game.”
Nurse said this is how he’s always done it, whether coaching in Britain or Iowa or Rio Grande Valley or now in the NBA. He’s not thinking about defined roles, but who is playing well in that moment, who has it on that night.
“I think the five best guys finished the game,” was how Nurse described his closing lineup on Wednesday. The five best guys at that particular moment, is what he meant. It could be a different closing group today, although it would be a shock if two of them were not named Kyle and Fred.
This part of Nurse’s value as a coach is the kind of thing that wouldn’t have been known until he started doing it in the NBA. When Masai Ujiri gave him the top job in 2018, Nurse was understood to be a bright basketball mind and game planner.
And he’s been that: witness the hoodie with a “Box+One” logo he has sometimes worn in the Orlando bubble, a wink to the high-school defence he broke out to slow down Steph Curry in the finals last year.
But the willingness to put starters on the bench late, to try unfamiliar groups, to make eyebrow-raising substitutions, this is the kind of thing that a relatively inexperienced NBA coach is often reluctant to do. Nurse has been like the poker player who makes enough strange bets and calls to leave the rest of the table unsure if he has a strategy or is just stone drunk. Winning a championship wasn’t about to make him more cautious.
It’s one of the many ways in which this Raptors team, even without the anchor of the all-world Kawhi Leonard, feels utterly different from the editions that were known for good regular seasons and subsequent playoff heartbreak. Those teams knew what they were for 82 games, and then they struggled to be anything else. They would end up searching for answers and then the season would be over before they had come up with a solution.
Nurse — and, it should be noted and underlined, this group of players — has shown over one playoff run and a teeny bit of another, a knack for figuring things out before it’s too late. He tries something. And then he tries something else.
“There are a million different ways to win a game,” he said Wednesday.
Check another one off the list, then.