Toronto Raptors coach Nick Nurse has been named NBA Coach of the Year.
Nurse, who has the Raptors on the brink of the second round of the playoffs, was a runaway winner, receiving 90 first-place votes from a jury of 100 sports reporters and broadcasters. He finished with 470 points.
Milwaukee manager Mike Budenholzer finished second after leading the Bucks to the best record in the suspended season, earning 147 points. Billy Donovan (134) of Oklahoma City is third.
The award was announced during TNT’s pre-game show before the Bucks took on the Orlando Magic on the NBA campus at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Florida. Kyle Lowry presented the nurse with the red Auerbach trophy while the coach was interviewed by the show jury.
The nurse is in her second season as a Raptors manager. The club went 53-19 in the shortened 2019-20 regular season in pandemic and recorded a 0.736 best franchise win rate.
Toronto won his first NBA title last season in Nurse’s first year as an NBA manager, with a superstar Kawhi Leonard lead the way. Leonard left for the Los Angeles Clippers in free agency shortly after the Toronto title race, but with Nurse the Raptors haven’t lost a beat without him.
The Raptors went 7-1 in seeding matches when the NBA resumed play after a months-long hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They will be looking for their first round of playoffs on Sunday, when they lead 3-0 in their series with the Brooklyn Nets.
The nurse is 111-43 in two seasons. It more than validated the Raptors’ decision to fire Dwane Casey in 2018, even though Casey was coach of the year that season after leading Toronto to a 59-23 record.
But the Raptors continued to be invaded LeBron James and Cleveland in the playoffs. So Masai team president Ujiri decided to part with Casey, the franchise’s career leader in victories, and promote Nurse, who had been an assistant for five years.
The nurse has already nearly caught Casey for the Raptors’ playoff record by going 19-8 in the past two seasons. Casey was 21-30 years old.
Nurse was praised for her ability to adapt on the fly and implement whimsical defensive schemes that deliver results. His use of the box-and-one scheme, rarely seen on a professional level, helped contain the Golden State sharpshooter Stephen Curry at last year’s NBA Finals.
Sam Mitchell is the only other Raptors manager to win the award, making it in 2007.
– With Associated Press files.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on August 22, 2020.
