TORONTO — When Nick Nurse was entering his sophomore season as a sharpshooting floor general with the University of Northern Iowa, a venerated coach from Ohio was hired to take over the school’s fledging basketball program: Eldon Miller.
It was a bit of a coup. Miller was beginning his 25th season at the helm of various NCAA programs and was coming off a long run of success and NCAA Tournament appearances at Ohio State. Northern Iowa didn’t know what success looked like. It had never sniffed the tournament. It was going to be a challenge.
“It was a program that had done nothing,” Nurse says. “And we went to the NCAA tournament — I think in his third or fourth year — for the first time in school history. It was kind of neat to be a part of that.”
As Nurse’s time at Northern Iowa approached its end, with an economics degree about to be completed and a future as an accountant ahead, he started contemplating a move to coaching. He knew he couldn’t cut it in pro ball but he wasn’t ready to leave the game. Miller, who’d become a trusted mentor over the years, understood. He told his young point guard to take the leap.
When Nurse graduated, Miller offered him a job as a graduate assistant on his staff. Give it a shot, see if you like it. And so began a nearly 30-year journey that ultimately led to Nurse’s name being announced as the head coach of the Toronto Raptors at Scotiabank Arena Wednesday night.
[relatedlinks]
“I don’t think, when I decided I didn’t want to be an accountant, that I was necessarily saying I wanted to be an NBA head coach,” Nurse said, before earning a victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers in his first game. “It’s certainly a pretty cool thing. But I hope it’s kind of just the beginning.”
Time will tell. After several years of running the Raptors offence under Dwane Casey, Nurse will not enjoy an extended runway with which to grow on the job. His promotion coincides with a watershed moment in this era of Raptors basketball — a season that begins in the aftershock of summer upheaval and will end with even greater turnover if things don’t go according to plan. These Raptors need to win. They need to win right now.
And Wednesday was a good start. Toronto never trailed by more than four against a transitioning Cavaliers outfit. And although he wasn’t faced with too many thorny scenarios until late in the game, Nurse pulled all the right levers. Eight separate players saw at least 17 minutes of run and Toronto’s rotation stretched all the way to 10. Five players scored in double digits, and nearly half the team’s field goals were assisted.
The Raptors slipped slightly in the fourth, forcing Nurse to call a timeout only 82 seconds in after Cleveland went on a 6-0 run. After calming things down, Nurse got a big three from Fred VanVleet on the other side of the break, and a sensational and-1 runner from the plucky point guard moments later, which put things back on the rails. Cleveland tried one last rally with three minutes to go, but another well-used timeout helped the Raptors stay in control.
“It was a little bit nerve-wracking there towards the end,” Nurse conceded afterwards. “When you’ve got a nice lead and all of a sudden it starts shrinking down there towards the end — that clock seems to be moving really slow.”
Evidently, nerves were a standard of Nurse’s first gameday as head coach. It was long, anxious. And he’d anticipated it. Figuring the night prior to his debut would be a sleepless one, Nurse woke up pre-dawn Tuesday to get a work out in at 5:30 a.m., trying to pre-emptively drain himself so that when his head hit the pillow that night he’d have an easy passage into sleep.
It worked — sort of. When Nurse lay down Tuesday night, a bit earlier than he usually does, he did so with the intention of visualizing some plays in his head before he drifted off.
“I’m not sure I made it through one — I fell asleep pretty quickly,” he says. “I’ve been dreaming about plays for a long time. That’s been my job here for five years — to try to get us buckets. So, I was going to run through a few in my head. But I didn’t get to them.”
A busy Wednesday morning schedule featuring a team shootaround and multiple meetings was useful in passing the time. An early-afternoon nap helped, too. But the hours before tip-off couldn’t go quickly enough. Nurse arrived at Scotiabank Arena around 4:30 p.m., and by the time he held his pre-game session with the media about an hour later, he was already in the well-tailored suit he’d wear on the Raptors bench that night. Most coaches stay in sweats until the last possible moment.
First impressions, right? And Nurse’s has been a long time coming. After a couple years on Miller’s staff at Northern Iowa, his first experience running a team came quickly when he was named the head coach at tiny Grand View College in 1991. Only 23, he was the youngest college basketball coach in the country. And he had no idea what he was doing.
“I think I jumped the gun a little bit on head coaching,” he says. “I remember getting that job and going, ‘Oh my god, they gave me the job.’ I called Eldon up and I called my high school coach and they were sending me books and tapes. You think you’re ready but you really aren’t at that age.”
Shockingly, it didn’t work out. He left Grand View after only two years. And following a few seasons working as an assistant at the University of South Dakota, Nurse departed for Europe where he spent more than a decade honing his craft in the British Basketball League. In 2007 he returned to the United States to help launch an NBA D League franchise, and after a half-dozen years, a couple D League championships, and more than 20 players graduated to the NBA, Nurse joined the Raptors.
In the time between then and now, his name came up again and again in the speculation surrounding NBA vacancies. His ascension to the top of a staff seemed more a matter of when, not if. And, in turn, Nurse has been preparing himself to make the jump for some time.
“For five years, I had a thousand people telling me I was going to be a head coach in the NBA,” he says. “And when I got the job, those same thousand people were shocked.”
Of course, the 51-year-old is still evolving, as all NBA bench bosses are. He’ll do things differently come the playoffs than he did them Wednesday night. He’ll probably do them a little differently next week. But through it all, he’s hoping to epitomize the sophistication he looked up to in Miller.
“He was a great fundamental coach and a super class guy,” Nurse says. “He did things the right way.”
This September, not long before his Raptors assembled for training camp, Nurse went to spend some time with Miller and his family at their home near Traverse City, Mich. Miller picked Nurse up from the airport and, after exchanging no more than a half minute of pleasantries, launched straight into a very brief, very direct piece of advice that Nurse won’t ever forget.
“He said, ‘You want to know what it’s all about?’” Nurse remembers. “And I said, ‘What’s that, coach?’ He goes, ‘Playing to win without fear.’ And that was the end of the conversation. From there, we just drove in silence.”
Wednesday, Nurse began implementing that advice. And he began with a win.
“It’s pretty cool, right?” he said after the game, bashfully looking down at the scoresheet in front of him through the rounded frames of his glasses. “It’s good to get it done. And now we can quit talking about it and start coaching.”
