Most first-time NBA head coaches are granted a safety net of sorts, tending to land on teams and in situations with measured expectations.
For instance, take three of the four first-timers taking the reins around the league this season. In Atlanta, new head coach Lloyd Pierce inherits a Hawks team building around rookies and sophomores and eying a long road ahead until there are real hopes to win. The same goes for Igor Kokoskov and his Phoenix Suns, where the organization has little choice but to be patient as he tries to instil good habits into his young squad. In Charlotte, former Spurs assistant James Borrego takes over a Hornets team at a crossroads where merely qualifying for the playoffs in his first season will be considered a success.
Not Nick Nurse.
The Toronto Raptors head coach is about to embark on his first season as an NBA bench boss with genuine pressure to succeed from Day 1. With a deep, versatile, and talented roster — arguably the best the franchise has trotted out in its history — it’s Finals or bust this season. Anything less than replicating the most successful playoff run the team has had to date and reaching the Conference Finals will be considered a disappointment.
It’s a rare position for a rookie coach to find himself in, and that notion is not lost on the 51 year-old.
“I agree that it’s unique,” Nurse told me earlier this summer over the phone from his childhood home in Carroll, Iowa, where he was visiting friends and family. “But when I get to the court it’s still just another team to coach.”
Like rookie players, new coaches are often given some breathing room to get acclimated to their new roles and enter environments that generally soften some of the pressures to “win now” that keep so many coaches on contending teams on the hot seat.
That’s not to say Nurse isn’t qualified to lead this Raptors team, or lacks the attributes to help the team reach it’s lofty goals. In many ways, the opposite is true.
As a head coach he led his team to two titles in the British Basketball League early in his career, repeated the feat in the G League, and has spent five seasons as an assistant coach — all with the Raptors — where he experienced coaching in the playoffs each year. He brings an inventive mind, particularly when it comes to offence, that bodes well in today’s NBA.
Holding the title of ‘NBA head coach’ may be new, but Nurse has been coaching basketball for 29 years now. “I’m hosting coaches meetings now,” says Nurse, “and the message is ‘let’s put the best coaching plan together.’ That feels comfortable. That’s familiar to me.”
There’s not exactly a long list of past coaches who have found themselves in Nurse’s position.
Coaches like Pat Riley, whose first coaching gig came in the 1981 season with the Los Angeles Lakers, Larry Bird, whose brief coaching career began in ’97 with the Indiana Pacers, and current Cleveland Cavaliers head coach Ty Lue, who was promoted partway through the 2015-16 season, all entered situations in which their teams were expected to compete for a title. Riley and Lue had the benefit of generational superstars like Magic Johnson and LeBron James on their roster, and had all won NBA championships as players, taking that crucial experience with them to the head coaching ranks.
In 2008 Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra took over from Pat Riley, already under considerable pressure walking into those shoes, but despite having Dwyane Wade in his prime, inherited a team still regrouping after winning the title two years prior with a focus on developing second overall draft pick Michael Beasley.
Lue is likely the most recent example of a coach entering the first year of the job with a contender but his predecessor, David Blatt, may make for a better comparison when it comes to Nurse. Blatt carved out a reputation as an elite coaching mind outside of the NBA and was hired as the Cavaliers head coach the same summer LeBron James made his return to Cleveland. Unlike Nurse, however, Blatt had never coached in the NBA before and it showed at least when it came to co-existing with star talent like James.
It was a difficult situation, with James overshadowing and at times undermining his coach — a problem Nurse likely won’t have with regards to his star player, Kawhi Leonard.
But that’s not to say there won’t be a learning curve for Nurse, especially when it comes to the multi-faceted nature of being an NBA head coach and the off-court responsibilities that come with the territory. It’s something Nurse realized in his first few days on the job.
“For me the biggest thing is, I think, being a head coach in the NBA is a much larger job organizationally, you know? There’s a lot of people in the organization that I’m meeting with continually, so that’s a part of the job I’ve never had to deal with before.”
When Nurse was promoted back in June, he inherited a team that had just posted the best regular season record in the East and with a talented core looking to repeat that success and shake off its recent playoff woes.
The promise of winning basketball was there, but when the Raptors dealt DeMar DeRozan to San Antonio in exchange for a pair of players with championship experience in Leonard, the 2014 Finals MVP, and Danny Green, that pressure for Nurse to excel immediately out of the gates only heightened — even if the coach himself doesn’t see it that way.
“I think [expectations] were already pretty high [before the trade],” says Nurse. “They were high to begin with and they’re still high now. Our expectations are to play for a championship, man. We’ve said it. Masai’s said it. Coach Casey has said it. And that’s honestly where we’re at. So it’s hard to raise it from there.”
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