10 Things: With Nick Nurse fired, Masai Ujiri now becomes the focus with Raptors

Here is the second part of a two-part series on the 10 trends worth noting from the Toronto Raptors' 2022-23 season. For thoughts 1 through 5, click here. 

6. Nick Nurse is good with tactics, but the job is so much more.

Two things can be true at once: coach Nick Nurse was given a flawed roster and he also didn’t bring the best out of the group. He is a creative tactician who should always be appreciated for his part in the championship, but this season was a reminder that X’s and O’s are just one aspect of the job. Being the smartest guy in the room isn’t worth much if you’re unable to inspire anyone in that room. 

Nurse’s unprompted and public preview of his upcoming exit in the midst of a playoff race was the last blunder that upset everyone from players to management and staff. His message was falling on deaf ears for months, and it was damning to hear president Masai Ujiri talk about the lack of accountability and culture after his firing.

The players held a team meeting six weeks into the season, and Ujiri himself had to lay into the team on a number of occasions, according to Sportsnet colleague Michael Grange, but isn’t that the coach’s responsibility? And, sure, the Raptors started poorly and suffered a few injuries, but did they ever find any consistency? The fourth-quarter collapses, the predictable and stagnant offense, the incessant double teams that opposing stars openly bragged about beating – where exactly were the brilliant solutions? More importantly, who was still in his corner after all the benchings, inconsistent minutes and public callouts? Even the assistant coaches seemed to be split, according to Grange, so is it a surprise that the players didn't all buy in if he couldn't even get it from his own staff?

The trouble with the smart-guy shtick is that you have to keep coming up with new ideas. The evidence of Nurse’s brilliance is in how the rest of the league copies his moves. He will always be known for playing a box-and-one against Stephen Curry in the NBA Finals, but three years later the Golden State Warriors used it on Fred VanVleet. Nurse also reintroduced other zone coverages, which ironically became the best and most consistent way to neuter Toronto’s bench lineups. Last season, Nurse pressed hard on the offensive rebounding, but now the whole league is going after the glass.

So what was the new gimmick this season? The Raptors leaned harder into inflating the margins by gambling for more steals and chasing more offensive rebounds, but continued to lose the bulk of the actual game. Toronto made 737 more field-goal attempts than its opponents, more than double the next closest team, at plus-344, but this overwhelming advantage didn't matter because it was also third-worst in effective field-goal percentage on offense and second-worst on defense. They had a plan to win the possession battle, but where were the answers for how the Raptors were going to score and how they were going to force misses?

Firing Nurse doesn’t solve everything on its own, but it’s a chance to improve. Nurse took over only five years ago, but only five coaches had more tenure. Change comes with the job; Ujiri said the point of the firing was partly made to “shock” the system. The reality is that the team needed a new voice with or without major roster moves to follow. Ujiri spoke of accountability, role definition, a lack of togetherness, the loss of culture; that all points to the need for improving how people were managed. 

7. Is this all there is with Gary Trent Jr.?

When the Raptors flipped Norman Powell for Gary Trent Jr. three seasons ago, the move was met with confusion. Powell was a fan favourite, but his play was up and down – a reliable finisher when he was set up to score, but just average at getting his own, and rarely assisted others. That skillset worked with starters, delivering an efficient 20 points in that role, but his production tailed off in the second unit, and without his volume scoring, he brought little else to the table. In acquiring Trent, the Raptors traded players but maintained the same dilemma.

The hope was that Trent could develop into something more. He developed a reputation in Portland as a dogged defender – most notably in the Bubble – and he was a younger player who was blocked by two established veterans. Bringing him to Toronto with the intent of re-signing him to a short-term deal created the chance to showcase something new.

Trent lacked the burst that made Powell effective in transition and at the rim, but he was a better shooter, had more craft in the midrange, and if his defensive impact was sustainable, the path to an upgrade was there. To start last season, Trent combined efficient scoring with disruptiveness on defense, where he was tops in the league in deflections and steals because he would so voraciously attack the ball, but that zeal faded as the year went on and did not come back this season.

At the end of it, Trent was specifically targeted on defense by the Chicago Bulls in the play-in game, just as he was in Game 6 by the Philadelphia 76ers in the previous playoff run. When teams had more time to scout and prepare for the Raptors, their conclusion was to attack Trent, and they were right.

Nurse drew a hard line with Trent this season. "We want him to be a disruptor. He kinda fits us if he does that, and if he doesn't, he doesn't fit us," Nurse said. And while it was just the one of many needlessly crass callouts by Nurse, it was right on the money. If Trent committed himself on the defensive end, he wouldn’t be a one-dimensional scorer, which was deemed secondary even on a team bereft of offense, with Nurse benching him twice in the span of three months. It didn’t quite make sense when Trent was demoted for Juancho Hernagomez, who was cut at the deadline simply to make space on the roster that was vacant for weeks until Will Barton, of all people, showed up.

But the starting five produced much better results when Trent was benched a second time with the arrival of Jakob Poeltl, who stabilized the group on defense. No matter how many times Nurse went out of his way to highlight Trent’s professionalism, his lineup decisions said it all. And while that might leave a sting in Trent’s mind as he decides on his future as a free agent, the same dilemma will exist no matter where he goes. His value as a sixth man is there – just look at Powell making $90 million for five years in L.A. – but until he adds more to his game, the Raptors can take it or leave it.

8. Precious Achiuwa is talented, but his growth stalled.

Toward the end of the season, Scottie Barnes decided to spice up his transition dunks by sprinkling in a handful of 360s. But when asked if he was the best dunker on the team, Barnes passed the honor to Precious Achiuwa, despite his own 40-inch vertical dominating the highlights. And while dunks are a very flashy and mostly cosmetic form of athleticism, Achiuwa has every form you could ask for. He has quick twitch to go zero to 60, glides both going downhill or moving laterally, is able to stop on a dime, and combines both leaping and sheer power to play through contact. On a team specifically curated for athleticism, Achiuwa still stands out among the group, which is what makes him the second-best prospect on the team behind Barnes despite other holes in his game.

Where there is an abundance of ability, there is a question of how best to translate it into results. Achiuwa has been at both ends of the spectrum in his three seasons. As a rookie in Miami, he was strictly limited to rebounding, defence, and if he didn’t nail the basics, he would not see the floor. When he moved to Toronto, where Ujiri gleefully recalled telling him “You are mine now” after the trade, Achiuwa has been encouraged to branch out and dabble. Nurse encouraged him to bring the ball up, to shoot with a green light from three, and to even attack in isolation, so long as he played defense at a premium position that the Raptors sorely lacked before Poeltl’s arrival. Often you would see mistakes, some that were elementary and uncommon at the NBA level, but rarely was Achiuwa benched for biting off more than he could chew.

This approach seemed to suit his nature, as Achiuwa is never short on confidence and his zeal for making plays never wavered, no matter the result.

But for a team looking to win, the mistakes do actually matter, and that was the story of Achiuwa’s season. It started with Nurse calling Achiuwa the most likely breakout candidate last off-season. But less than a month into the campaign, Nurse was already calling him out before a fateful game against the Houston Rockets on account of his poor defense.

Unfortunately, Achiuwa suffered the first prolonged injury of his career that night, and it knocked him out for six weeks, but the chance at redemption was there upon his return. Achiuwa was promoted to the starting lineup when O.G. Anunoby was sidelined, which led to his best stretch of the season, including a standout 27-point outburst against the Portland Trail Blazers.

However, when the Raptors got healthy and added a centre at the trade deadline, Achiuwa was knocked back to the reserves, where his performance plummeted until he was a healthy scratch. There were times where he was so lost on the very basics of the sport on both sides of the ball that you couldn’t help but wonder if he was struggling to maintain his focus. In the play-in, Achiuwa appeared for only nine minutes, where he was a minus-9, which was a sharp decline as compared to the 28 minutes per game that he averaged against Philadelphia last season.

Achiuwa will benefit from structure more than anyone else on the team. There should be space left for him to explore his talents, but the priorities in his role need to be on screening, rebounding, defense and making the right reads on offense. The goal isn’t to deny his aggressiveness, but to align it with how he can best influence winning. It’s not a coincidence that the only stretch of positive play was when he played with the starters, because that’s the only group that had a clear idea of what they were doing.

Achiuwa is a hardworking player who is routinely seen getting in extra work after practices, and it did translate to tangible improvements in his paint efficiency, even if his three-point shot remains a work in progress. The more that the Raptors define his role, the better both he and the team will be. 

9. Vision 6-9 is clearly lacking in guard skills.

The whole idea of running a team of interchangeable forwards came about as a response to the explosion of perimeter talent. Without the option to switch pick-and-rolls, teams would inevitably run into the unsolvable problem of having to assign extra defenders to cover mismatches while also sprinting out to cover the three-point line. The Warriors’ signature small-ball lineup attacked this dichotomy on both ends of the floor, as do their closest challengers in the Boston Celtics, as well as the L.A. Clippers and other challengers. In that sense, Toronto’s “Vision 6-9” strategy wasn’t unique except that it lacked the very offensive threat that this strategy was built to counter.

The biggest weakness of the Raptors going on three seasons is an absence of shooting. In a league where five-out offenses are increasingly common, the Raptors struggle to even play three-out. An injury to Otto Porter Jr. should never be devastating since it's inevitable, and yet his absence led to the Raptors constantly being one shooter short. Siakam and Barnes were first and third in shot attempts, and both players launched more from the dreaded midrange than from three. That is acceptable if they’re putting pressure on the paint and drawing extra defenders, but the Raptors couldn’t convert on their kickouts. Toronto ranked 26th in both makes and percentage on catch-and-shoot threes.

Or put it another way: In a year where the league average three-point percentage was 37.7 per cent, Anunoby was the only one to exceed it, at 38.7 percent. It’s possible that the team-wide struggles with shooting could be attributed to a poor system that didn’t create the best looks overall, the simple fact is that many players struggle to shoot. All you would need to do is attend warmups before any game to see that all but three players (Anunoby, VanVleet, Trent) are inconsistent, even without a defender present. 

Beyond the need across the board for shooting, the Raptors also lack another playmaker to generate offense off the bench. The starting five played great, but the level of play began to drop with each successive reserve that was introduced. In lineups to open the second and fourth quarters, it was essentially just starters being overextended with more usage rather than a backup option changing the pace of the game. Malachi Flynn, Jeff Dowtin, and Dalano Banton have gotten a few looks, but all they did was defer. The last-minute addition of Will Barton in the buyout market was so obviously a band-aid to a bigger problem. In the past, the Raptors had success with putting two pick-and-roll threats on the floor at the same time to constantly pressure the rim and create kickouts. The talent isn't there now to replicate that.

What’s notable is that the Raptors have generally struggled to find productive players off the bench for several seasons. In the championship season, VanVleet was up and down as the main reserve until he caught fire in the latter rounds, while Anunoby had the worst season of his career as a reserve before succumbing to injuries. The following season, it was Powell who struggled in carrying the bench. This time, Achiuwa and Trent saw their productivity drop. That points to a systemic flaw that needs to be addressed, in addition to bringing in more talent. 

10. The buck ultimately stops with Masai Ujiri and no one else.

The timing of Ujiri's season-ending media conference was rather fortunate. Without the news of Nurse's firing to dig into, the focus and attention would have been on Ujiri's part in assembling this flawed roster and the loss of culture on his watch. Removing Nurse made sense for all the reasons he said publicly and for more reasons that remained unspoken but, as Ujiri said, he takes responsibility for this season.

The first order of business will be finding a new coach. The hope is that this new leader can win the trust and respect of the players, and restore accountability. That will take someone who can clearly communicate expectations to players and to hold both the players and themselves honest to what is agreed upon. A new system would also be welcome, especially with regards to getting the best out of this group defensively. But it will take more than a new voice to get everything in line.

As Ujiri said this week, his approach with Nurse was to hire people and let them do his job, but maybe he needed to be around the team and speak up more often.

As for the roster, the safe bet is that Ujiri will stick with the same strategy of building through the middle. The time to bottom out was at the trade deadline, when the Raptors were four games under .500 with a possible shot at top-six lottery odds, but Ujiri chose to add. The thought process with adding Poeltl is that he was a top-10 centre who was available for a first-round pick, and so the price being right superseded the timing being wrong.

In a nutshell, that is middle approach of accumulating assets, and it will likely inform how Ujiri approaches his key free agents. So long as the Raptors can re-sign Poeltl, VanVleet and perhaps Trent to positive-value contracts, it makes sense to keep the asset. Even if they let everyone walk, there is no path to meaningful cap room, and Ujiri noted that star players are now signing extensions and then asking for trades rather than entertaining free agency. That means the Raptors will need to have appealing players to deal if they want to be in position to make the next Kawhi Leonard trade.

That doesn't rule out the potential of a trade to balance the roster. The Raptors badly need more guard depth, so a trade involving one of their many bench forwards would make sense. If Ujiri doesn't see value in signing Anunoby and Pascal Siakam to their upcoming extensions, moving one of them with a year left on their deals would be wise. Better yet, if a star were to ask out as Kevin Durant and Donovan Mitchell did last summer, the Raptors should feel much less attached than they a year ago. But don't be surprised if the same group is brought back. Ujiri's history says he is pragmatic and patient, above all else.

The lifeblood of the Raptors is player development, and that's the biggest concern that needs to be addressed if there is to be any upward trajectory. When the biggest success stories in a year is Dowtin and Christian Koloko showing the potential to maybe fill backup roles, that is a massive red flag. The Raptors can't keep repeating the same old stories of Anunoby, Siakam and VanVleet growing into starters from low draft positions from seven years ago. Take Anunoby, for example. He was drafted 23rd in 2017 and, six years later, reports are that the Raptors wouldn't accept less than three firsts for him.

That's the value of player development, but would the Raptors break even with some of their recent selections? Would Malachi Flynn return the 29th pick it took to acquire him? Would Koloko get a 33rd? Dalano Banton for a 46th? Barnes gets you the fourth pick in this year's draft, but definitely not one or two.

The whole process needs to be evaluated -- from scouting and analytics, to player acquisition, to skill development, to coaching strategy -- because this is the foundation of the franchise.