Nick Nurse offers a blunt self-assessment of his first quarter-season as an NBA head coach.
Despite his Toronto Raptors getting off to the best start in franchise history, despite a deep roster that’s finally close to full health, and with a new star player defying logic by assimilating more quickly than many expected, Nurse knows he has more to give.
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“I have told you guys I feel comfortable; I still feel pretty comfortable,” Nurse said as the Raptors prepared to face the Miami Heat at Scotiabank Arena on Sunday.
“I did expect some rust, and there is still a little bit there. I think there are still another 20 games or so I am looking forward to getting to, and making some better decisions.”
There isn’t much difference in the time the job takes, compared to his previous incarnation as a Raptors assistant — all the days are long and complicated, and there’s not a lot of down time — but the demands of being in charge are different. In-game decisions involve consultation with his assistants, but the final decision always rests with Nurse and that’s where he can see ways to improve.
Split-second decisions, when to break out special-circumstances plays that have been worked on in practice but not tried in games, surviving the cauldron of the moment and thriving — all of that takes some getting used to.
“There’s a lot of things I have lightly put in and worked on that I haven’t busted out yet in games. I’m about ready,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of things that are familiar just because of time constraints and ease of saying ‘Let’s do that now and it will get us through today.’
“The stuff that I want, to get to who we are going to become, has not really been brought out yet.”
A prime example is the play the Raptors ran to win a game at the buzzer in Orlando last week. Toronto ran a set to free up Danny Green for a shot that he hit, but the counters involved secondary possibilities for either Kawhi Leonard or Serge Ibaka.
The play call wasn’t extraordinarily inventive, but it’s the kind of thing Nurse wants to use more as the season progresses.
The easy thing to do — and what they will likely do at other points this season — would have been to give the ball to Leonard or Kyle Lowry and let them go to work. But having practised a few unfamiliar looks got the Raptors a win, and Nurse some coaching cred with the team.
“That was a huge step forward for us,” Nurse said. “As a coach you are talking theory and explaining why you are doing stuff in practice, and they’re all kind of scratching their heads and looking at you and squinting their eyes — not rolling their eyes. Then it kind of works in a game and then you have a (few) more things you can do.”
The rest of the job is just the rest of the job and it takes some getting used to. There are demands away from the games — meetings, media obligations, chats with his superiors — that alter the workload.
“It’s just all together different,” he said. “It doesn’t move any slower as an assistant or faster. As an assistant you are grinding it out and churning out work like there are not enough hours in the day, really. As a head coach you are doing similar.
“I used to say, as an assistant, I would go in and close my door for three hours after practice and just watch film. Now it seems like I’m in a meeting and then another and then another for three hours that have nothing to do with basketball. It’s just different. It still moves fast.”
But with time to get better.
Doug Smith is a sports reporter based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @smithraps
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