It’s been a whirlwind week for the Toronto Raptors and their head coach Nick Nurse.
During that time, Nurse’s wife, Roberta, gave birth and his Raptors capped off their rally against the Milwaukee Bucks with a Game 6 win to bring an NBA Finals game to Canadian soil for the first time in history this Thursday.
The gravity of that moment isn’t lost on Nurse.
“The biggest difference was just going outside yesterday,” Nurse said on Sportsnet’s Prime Time Sports.
“Everybody I bumped into seemed to have been watching the game, so it was a lot of happy fans obviously, a lot of congratulations. And it’s awesome, I said it right after the game when somebody grabbed me for an interview, I said ‘well, this is an amazing city and I’m really happy for the people of this city to be able to share in this.'”
A great deal of digital ink has already been, rightly, spent explaining what reaching the Finals means to not only the Raptors, but to Toronto and Canada as a whole. However, as president Masai Ujiri made clear while the team celebrated their Eastern Conference Finals win at centre court, the season — and the goals that come with it — isn’t done yet.
After taking a day to catch their collective breath, Nurse and the Raptors are preparing to tackle their biggest challenge yet: How do you dethrone the Golden State Warriors?
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The answer, for most teams, is simply that you don’t. But with Kevin Durant‘s health up in the air, the window for the Raptors to walk away champions seems to be as open as it has been in years — even if that still amounts to only a crack.
“I see the reports [about Durant missing Game 1] but I think there’s always a bit of a way out on all those things, even though they sent out a release saying he won’t play but he will join the series at some point. Well, at some point to me could mean Game 1,” Nurse said when asked to explain his approach to preparing for the Warriors.
With or without Durant, the Warriors still boast lineups featuring Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, two of the most dominant shooters in NBA history — bonafide superstars who can change the tone of a game at a moment’s notice — who will present the Raptors with a puzzle that’s different from any of the stars they’ve solved en route to the Finals.
“These guys [the Warriors] do have a lot of shooting, but it’s kind of top-end shooting, they may have two or three of the best shooters in the whole league and they focus on getting those guys the shots, where Milwaukee it was whoever was out there,” Nurse explained.
“A lot more actions by Golden State than Milwaukee, kind of maybe a hybrid between Philly and Milwaukee, if I had to pick.
“Each series really is quite different,” he continued, “Orlando was a set-play team, Philly was a set-play team, Milwaukee wasn’t a set-play team at all. These guys are probably a little bit in between, they like to play their share of random basketball, but they do have quite a few sets you have to get ready for too.”
No small task, to be sure. But for Nurse, a rookie head coach whose first season as the leading man behind an NBA bench has been defined by big, sweeping changes, and who now must keep a roster steady as swaths of global media descend upon the city, the goal for both him and his team is to maintain as much normalcy as possible.
“For the most part, we’ll get in our locker-room and show our film just as normal. We’ll go up to our practice court and walk through things like we normally would,” Nurse said. “There’s not a lot of practising going on, to be honest, for our key guys it’s more about recovery and rest, and getting re-energized for the next one because as you’ve seen, the intensity of these games is up there.
“…you gotta rest their minds too. There’s a lot of everything. There’s a lot of prep, a lot of thinking, a lot of pressure, a lot of celebration, a lot of things emotionally you have to step away from too to kind of re-energize.”
As for reports of him taking on the task of guiding Canada at the FIBA World Cup, Nurse made clear where his priorities are right now.
“That’s premature. I don’t know who it was that reported that, I’m just focused on this deal right now and we’ll worry about that when the Raptors’ season is over.”
