Happy Return: Nick Nurse's 76ers top Raptors in coach's first game back

TORONTO — “Everyone is where they’re supposed to be.”

That’s how former Toronto Raptors head coach Nick Nurse summed up his exit from the team he served for five years as an assistant coach and five as a head coach, a term that started with the team's glorious ride to the NBA title in 2019. 

He was fired in April, a week after a disappointing 41-41 season, but really it was as much him deciding he wanted to move on and the Raptors being more than happy to accommodate Nurse, who had one year left on his contract, than a nasty divorce. An amicable parting, really.

There were some good jobs available, and Nurse was in the mix on most of them before he reunited with his former boss with the Houston Rockets organization -- Philadelphia 76ers president of basketball operations Daryl Morey. 

The Raptors moved on, settling on new head coach Darko Rajakovic and the early returns are promising. No hard feelings, as the crowd at Scotiabank Arena indicated with a warm ovation for Nurse on Saturday after a tribute video played on the big screen in a timeout during the Raptors-Sixers game in the first quarter. 

“I wasn’t surprised [about being fired],” said Nurse as the Sixers got ready to play their first game in Toronto since the change. Nurse added later that he’d begin to get the sense his time with the Raptors might be coming to an end mid-season as Toronto suffered through an extended slide in December and into early January. 

“All of a sudden, lots of people are talking. Stuff happens fast, right? So that probably gets you thinking about what if something's going to happen? Just a little bit,” said Nurse. “Like, I'm pretty good at just focusing in on the next team ahead and coaching. But that's probably when it starts.”

The NBA schedule being what it is, it didn’t take long for a pair of Atlantic Division rivals’ paths to cross. And like Nurse said, it was a little weird as he sat in Toronto Friday watching his old team play on television in Chicago while the Sixers -- who started their season with a road loss in Milwaukee -- waited to play them.

The occasion was notable for its lack of tension. It was nothing like former Raptors head coach Dwane Casey’s first game back in Toronto with the Detroit Pistons. Casey very much didn’t want to get fired and wasn’t very happy that it was his former assistant, Nurse, who replaced him. The two men won’t be having coffee together any time soon, even five years on. 

Rajakovic and Nurse have no meaningful history other than some games against each other when they were each coaching in the G-League. Both coaches were complimentary of the other pre-game.

It was really just a night about Nurse’s reaction to being back in his old stomping grounds but working for another team.

“I would say that I wasn't maybe ready for coming back this quick,” said Nurse, who didn’t get a chance to see the video tribute but was gifted a collection of memorabilia from this old club. “It felt like really way more stranger than I thought it was going to feel. I know everything's magnified on this level, but I've left teams and gone back to coach at places many many times in my career. But it's 10 years. You know, I always say my kids are born here. They got Canadian passports, did all that time with the national team. Unbelievable the way people have treated me here, unbelievable city right. It's kind of hitting me a little bit, for sure.”

Another bit of strange: Nurse left SBA a winner, but the Raptors lost, as Nurse is now 1-0 against his old team as the Sixers pushed past Toronto in the second half on the way to a 114-107 win that improved Philadelphia to 1-1 on the season and dropped the home side to 1-2.

The Raptors wasted the best game of rookie Gradey Dick’s career, as the No. 12 overall pick in this year's draft finished with 16 points after going scoreless in his first two games.

“My first points in an NBA game, that’s something special, a dream come true that I’ve had since I was a little kid and first started playing basketball,” said Dick, who is still a month away from his 20h birthday. “I can’t wait to go talk to my brother, my sister and my parents about it.”

His fourth triple of the game -- and his career-- pulled the Raptors within five with 6:20 left to play. But that was as close as Toronto got as the Sixers quickly responded with a 7-0 run to give them the buffer then needed.

The Raptors were led by Scottie Barnes, who continued his strong start to the season by putting up 24 points on 11-of-14 shooting while adding eight rebounds, five assists and two blocks. That wasn’t enough to counter a pair of 34-point nights from Sixers star Joel Embiid and emerging start Tyrese Maxey, who is thriving with the additional responsibilities he’s getting while James Harden stays out of the lineup as he tries to force the Sixers to trade him. 

The Raptors came out of the gate seemingly determined to let their old coach know that they were doing just fine without him even after losing in overtime in Chicago on Friday night and getting back in the wee hours of Saturday morning. Toronto led 36-27 after the first quarter and knocked down all seven of its three-point attempts. You could say they were trolling their old coach, who had to sit through some rough shooting nights last season, but two of the seven came from Dick, who scored his first eight NBA points in a five-minute stretch to end the opening period. 

Toronto led by as many as 12 early in the second quarter after struggling reserve guard Malachi Flynn hit a triple -- Toronto’s eighth straight without a miss -- but the Sixers came back with a 19-7 run sparked by Maxey, who tied the game on a 32-foot three. Maxey hit all three of the Sixers triples in the half, the rest of the team going 0-for-11. Toronto shot 10-of-16 in the first half and led 59-56 at half. 

Seeing the ball go in — in a variety of ways — had to be a relief for the Raptors, who had the NBA’s lowest-rated half-court offence after two games, suggesting that maybe Toronto’s struggles in that area a year ago weren’t a Nick Nurse problem. Toronto shot 52.5 per cent from the field and had 15 assists against eight turnovers in the first half, all areas of improvement. In addition to the threes, there were some nice baskets off  cuts and driving lanes opened up after dribble hand-offs at the elbows -- all as promised by the Raptors in training camp but missing in the first two games of the regular season. 

“It is going to be a journey,” said Rajakovic. “It's going to be a process, and we're going to stay together on that journey. I think the most important thing for us is understanding that it's going to take some time to have clarity [with] what we really want to do and not to get lost in competition itself that's, 'Oh, let's get away from this because at some point something else might work a little bit better.' We got to see the big picture. We got to be able to be committed to our new habits and creating new habits, which is passing the ball, playing for each other, and making those habits stick.”

But habits take time to develop, and fatigue is never kind when adversity strikes. The rested Sixers came out on a mission to start the third quarter, sprinting out to a 21-5 run punctuated by another Maxey three that came after it seemed the referees had missed an obvious foul on a Barnes lay-up at the other end. Rajakovic picked up his first technical foul in protest. Embiid missed the free throw, but Philly led 77-64 and you had to wonder if the Raptors' legs were beginning to fail them as the Sixers took a 91-79 edge into the final quarter. 

The Raptors weren’t as sharp defensively as they were in the first two games as Philly shot 50 per cent from the floor for the game and were lacking the swarming energy that sustained them in a win over Minnesota and hard-fought loss to Chicago.

For Nurse, it meant he can leave SBA as a winner one more time — albeit for a different team. For the team he left behind, it means there is more work to be done.