TORONTO – Toronto Raptors head coach Nick Nurse isn’t afraid of a little experimentation.
Even if it seems like he’s bringing back schemes and ideas most commonly seen from the high school game.
Nurse has, of course, famously and effectively made use of a box-and-one style of zone defence and even some triangle-and-two strategies more commonly seen in the high school ranks. With the addition of new assistant Trevor Gleeson, it looks like he may bring a high school style to his offence.
Gleeson was announced as an addition to Nurse’s staff back in August and comes to Toronto after a very successful eight-year stint as head coach of the Perth Wildcats in his native Australian professional league, the National Basketball League (NBL).
During his tenure with the Wildcats, Gleeson helped Perth win five NBL championships and two coach of the year honours, doing so while employing a flex offence – an offensive scheme that’s commonly used by high school programs because of the relative simplicity of the strategy for players to remember.
“It’s a four-out, one-in offence,” the 53-year-old said Friday. “It’s dictated on playing unselfish basketball, finding the open man and working as a team to find the best shot.”
Essentially, a flex offence is a type of “continuity offence” predicated on players cutting across the key (also known as a “flex cut”) and setting down screens to open players up. It’s generally popular among high school programs because the patterns that players cut across and set screens are easy to remember and, as Gleeson alluded to, it’s an unselfish system that doesn’t require one big gun to win a positional battle and get open in order for the strategy to work.
It’s a simple system but, as Gleeson proved during his time at Perth, it can work at a pro-level with enough tweaks added to it because his version of the flex certainly isn’t anything you’ve seen before.
“I used to coach in Australia and the legendary coach over there Lindsay Gaze used to run the shuffle (offensive scheme) and it used to upset me all the time that I’d make a mistake and he’d get a layup,” said Gleeson of how he came to start utilizing flex. “And then I started watching some more international (games) and I think it might have been 2004 or 2006 Argentina was running it with (Manu) Ginobili and they won the world championship with it. And I thought, ‘OK,’ and it really started as a secondary offence, and then it just evolved out of that.
“I wanted to get my best players the ball in their hands at the right spot and play unselfish basketball, to have a counter if that got taken and it really developed out of that ... It's been successful for the last 10 years that I've been using it.”
A decade of success using a flex offence is a pretty good track record, but the NBL isn’t the NBA, so there might be some understandable reservations about its viability in the world’s greatest league. However, Gleeson sees a real opportunity for his signature offensive style in the NBA right now.
“I think that the NBA has changed in the last six, eight years,” he said. “I came over and coached the CBA in 2000 to 2004, and it was more isolated ball, you know, it's getting three guys on the side and isolate, get your best player, and now with the international players coming through that can make passes, cuts, and reads. The NBA has really developed into that.
“Obviously, you still want your rock stars getting the ball at the right time, but I think the NBA is moving toward that more international sharing the ball. Not all teams are but most of the teams that are successful have a three-pronged attack out there. So hopefully we might be able to use some of those elements in the near future.”
For the Raptors, a more unselfish brand of offence might suit them better to create scoring opportunities this season, especially as the team’s “rock star” Pascal Siakam won’t be in the lineup for the first few weeks of the season.
“It’s really getting guys on the court to have that chemistry, to pass up a good shot to get a great shot,” Gleeson said. “Once you get a team in that frame of mind, it’s fun to play out on the court. We’re really working to get the guys on the spots and spacing and reads.”
Gleeson wasn’t just brought in for his expertise of the flex offence, though, he’ll also be asked to help the team defensively. His extensive coaching career has seen him coach not only in the NBL but also in the Continental Basketball League (CBA) and even the Korean Basketball League.
“Trevor's a really interesting guy, first of all. A really, really good coach. I think he's won five of the last seven championships in Australia. Which, the league's a pretty high level over there. And he's got a lot of head coaching experience,” said Nurse earlier this week of Gleeson. “He went through the minor leagues, somehow, and he was in the Sioux Falls Skyforce back in the CBA, and he's got a lot of different experiences as a head coach.
“I value that on my staff, somebody that can give you a viewpoint from all sides of it, and who knows kind of what it feels like to be sitting in that seat ... He's really smart and a really good coach, and he's won a lot. I like all those characteristics.”
So between his maestro-level command of the flex offence and his wealth of experience along the sidelines, it’s easy to see why the Raptors wanted a guy like Gleeson on their coaching staff, but it’s not quite so apparent as to why Gleeson – who has two children aged 11 and 13, respectively – would want to leave a great situation he had in Perth to suddenly uplift his life to take this opportunity in Toronto.
“It was a relationship I had with coach Nurse,” said Gleeson. “We were talking for a few years. He had a couple changes in the staff and it was really, ‘can I put my head on the pillow and say no to the NBA?’ It’s tough. It’s hard, especially being away from my family, but it’s also a great work environment. Coach is very open. He’s very open and experimenting and trying to find the next thing. He’s not close-minded. Professionally, it’s a no-brainer.”
To see that it was Nurse who was, ultimately, the reason why Gleeson decided to come on board shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given the Raptors head coach seems to have a special connection to just about every notable basketball coach in the world. The way Nurse appears to have built his relationship with Gleeson sounds what has become known as typical Nurse.
“We have a lot of mutual friends. I hadn’t really met him at all before 2019,” said Gleeson. “He came over to Perth with the Canadian team before the World Championships. I ran into him a couple times at Summer League that he probably wouldn’t remember who I was, then he came to Perth and it was more of a reach-out and to pick his brain.
“I was picking his brain for the Perth Wildcats. We kept in contact from there and I’d shoot him off different ideas. I’d ask him how he defends stuff that I was having problems with. We built a rapport up with him over a couple years. It’s been a great relationship.”
And now that relationship has blossomed enough that Nurse was able to convince one of the most successful coaches outside the NBA to take the leap and work with him on the Raptors bench.
It pays to have a lot of highly-skilled coaching friends.
