It’s fun where life can take you, if you have enough, if you give everything. A long time ago when Nick Nurse was in England when Masai Ujiri was in England. They would also land in Belgium at the same time, both times in different teams. Ujiri knew the nurse was like him, one of the thousands of lifes who chased basketball wherever they could.
“I was probably a little anxious as a young manager because I thought I had a lot of ideas, and I thought I had to try them, and I had to go get a team somewhere,” said Nurse, the Toronto Raptors coach, after being named NBA Coach of the Year 2019-20 by overwhelming vote. “And I did.”
It’s easy to look at Nurse’s life and conclude, in retrospect, that everything prepared him for it. But who would say how it happened, looking from the outside? Who would look at assistant jobs at a small college, a coaching assignment at a smaller college, a player coaching job in England, a stopover in Belgium, and foresee it? Even after his hugely successful but largely obscure period as head coach in the British League, or similar success in the evolutionary D League, who could have known?
Hell, Nick Nurse didn’t know. And he was doing it.
“I’m not so sure where we’re sitting now, I knew what the hell I was doing,” the nurse said. “I didn’t know which road I was on.
“I wanted to train. I got a little job in college, and then I went from being an assistant for a couple of years but again trying to try new ideas brought me back to England so I could get another team to coach. . So I was just trying to figure out if my ideas were right; I was trying to figure out how I can improve every year.
“And… I knew I was getting better. I could feel it. And (in the D-League, now called the G League), people were asking me, ‘Well, why aren’t you in the NBA? You are having so much success. ‘And I never really worried about that, because I felt like I was improving a lot every year.
“So it was about loving each of those jobs and trying to improve a lot every year.”
That’s all. That’s all. The nurse told the story of starting 8-8 in his first real coaching job in England, Birmingham, and said: “I went back to my hotel thinking maybe I should pack my bags and go home. I have I jotted down four other things that I thought I would like and they all looked like shit to me, so I thought I’d better work on coaching and understand that. “
Many of us have those moments when we chase dreams and success really seems inevitable only in retrospect. The nurse list, as he remembered it, had to be a recreation center manager, work in real estate, have a bachelor’s degree in accounting, and something lost in history. Eventually Nurse was a hot name in the NBA development league and the Raptors were looking for an offensive mind, and Ujiri, who now led the Raptors, remembered it: Nurse had kept in touch. And the nurse had ideas.
And when Dwane Casey’s time with Toronto ended in 2018, after a successful run and his coach of the year award, he wasn’t sure Nurse would get the job. But he had ideas: this is what I would run here, this is how I will handle it, this is what I think, me, right here. Not a soul could be truly sure how Nurse would react to the big job, to managing NBA players as head coach, to chess games played on the freeway, to the pressure of a team that had won, but not really.
With Toronto, Nurse has the highest regular season win rate in history, with a smaller champion than the late Steve Kerr and Phil Jackson; he has an NBA title, and his Raptors, after losing the best basketball player, are somehow chasing another. Every Nurse game puts on a show: game plan, adjustments, box-and-one even in the NBA Finals, without fear.
And none of that is guaranteed, but it turns out he’s a coach’s genius. Maybe Nick Nurse is never afraid to try something because he had done it with love, energy and devotion from the moment he made that list of alternative careers. His players trust him, and he trusts them, and the result is a culture: a team that is hard as hell, defends itself like demons, trusts each other, and enters every gym with one. performance standards. Remember against Milwaukee last year, and Nurse was asked if she had to decide between defending Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Bucks shooters? And he said, I want it all. I want everything. And he understood.
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“We don’t do this every night, but we go out fighting most nights, and that’s the trait I think I’d say we should all be proud of,” Nurse said.
You know who the Raptors are and you know you can count on Nick Nurse, before the game and on the fly. Nobody knew it would work, not really. But sometimes if you have enough, if you give it all, it does.
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