At one of his former team’s many low points this season the discussion was why the Toronto Raptors couldn’t seem to get the benefit of the doubt from league officials.
The Raptors were in Los Angeles, a couple of nights removed from a controversial series of calls that went against them down the stretch in a loss against Denver and practising the day after Raptors guard Fred VanVleet unfurled an epic, all-time rant against the state of refereeing in general and specifically Ben Taylor, who had hit him with a technical foul at a critical point during a loss to the Clippers.
In a moment of exasperation, and by way of explanation, the Raptors head coach Nick Nurse summed up the Raptors referee woes this way: “It’s a superstar’s league, and we don’t have one.”
He had a point. The post-Kawhi Leonard Raptors had plenty of excellent players – all-NBA performers and all-stars – but none that would meet the vague definition of superstar.
But Nurse won’t have that problem anymore. Since being fired back in April after five years as the head coach in Toronto, Nurse has been the belle of the NBA’s coaching carousel, short-listed for job openings in Milwaukee, Phoenix and Philadelphia, in each case mulling over opportunities to coach the league’s best players at or near their prime. Each job offered the chance to coach an NBA MVP.
On Monday evening it was reported that the Philadelphia 76ers had hired Nurse, pairing the 2019-20 coach of the year with the biggest — literally — star in the sport, 2022-23 MVP Joel Embiid
Getting superstar calls shouldn’t be a problem. Embiid won his first MVP award this past season after finishing second the previous two years in part by leading the NBA in scoring with 33.1 points a game, a total helped along by his 11.9 free throw attempts per game — second most in the league and the fourth time in five years he’s averaged in double figures.
For the second time in his career Nurse will have a chance to organize a team around one of the best players in the world. The first time it was Leonard, and — as anyone knows — the then-rookie Raptors head coach didn’t fumble the bag: he rode Leonard and a deep, veteran, team to the 2019 NBA title.
How he handled himself over that run – figuring out a defensive scheme that mostly stymied Embiid in a seven-game, second-round series, subsequently slowing down Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks in the Eastern Conference Finals and then re-introducing the world to the ‘box-and-1’ in the NBA Finals as the Raptors took advantage of an injury-depleted Golden State Warriors team to use Fred VanVleet to shadow Warriors’ star Steph Curry everywhere he went. “Janky defence”, Curry called it, but it worked.
Nurse did himself one better the 2019-20 season after Leonard left the Raptors for the Los Angeles Clippers in free agency when he led Toronto to the NBA’s second-best record – and the best winning percentage in Raptors franchise history – before falling the Celtics in a second-round series in the NBA bubble.
Those first two seasons have done a lot of heavy lifting for Nurse and his reputation, a not insignificant benefit in a business as subjective and reputationally dependent as NBA coaching.
Take those two years away and Nurse is a coach with some question marks. His teams have finished in the lottery twice, and in the year they didn’t, Toronto was able to cobble a surprising 48-win season in 2021-22 on the strength of – it’s apparent in retrospect – his willingness to play his starters more than any coach in the league and a second-half surge aided by the unwillingness of many visiting teams to bring their best players across the Canada-U.S. border for fear of getting stranded by a positive COVID test.
Still, Nurse deserves plenty of credit for figuring out how to win games with a flawed Raptors lineup. He leaned heavily into a play style designed to give his offensively challenged Toronto club a chance to paper over their weaknesses by emphasizing offensive rebounding and forced turnovers. If Toronto wasn’t a good shooting team or blessed by the kind of superstar presence that can bend defences on their own, the plan was to get the Raptors more shot attempts than their opponents, and hope to overwhelm them with sheer volume.
No team took more shots than their opponents more often the past two seasons than the Raptors.
The Sixers present an entirely different challenge.
In Embiid they have the game’s singularly most dominant offensive presence and – when he chooses to be – arguably the most impactful defender too.
But the big Cameroonian going into his eighth season has flaws and no one has been better at exploiting over recent years than Nurse as his teams would double and otherwise harass Embiid to the point of frustration and beyond.
Embiid’s career scoring average versus Nurse’s Raptors teams is 22.3 points per game, the lowest against any team he’s played at least 10 times. In 13 playoff games against the Raptors Embiid has averaged just 21.2 points (on 44 per cent shooting) while coughing up a hefty 3.7 turnovers per game.
Over time, Nurse seemed to take up some prime real estate in Embiid’s head. During the Sixers' first-round playoff series win over the Raptors in 2021-22, Embiid complained about Nurse’s penchant for working referees: “I told him to stop bitching about calls,” Embiid said.
After a regular season win over the Raptors this year during which the Raptors committed heavy resources to limit Embiid’s touches and shot attempts only to have his teammate De’Anthony Melton step up and hit a critical three, Embiid said of Nurse’s Raptors:
“They just want to shut down the other star players. But when you play that, you got to be ready all night. You got to stay alert and have the confidence of just keep shooting it and hope that you make them when they come, and that's what [Melton] did tonight."
But game respects game. And just as Nurse reportedly jumped at the chance to get one of the best players in the NBA to reach his potential – Embiid has never taken the 76ers past the second round – Embiid needs the former Raptors head coach to succeed as much as vice versa.
The devil will be in the details. The Sixers need to figure out what to do with pending free agent James Harden. Signing him locks Philadelphia into a roster that wasn’t good enough to get past the Celtics in the second round this season or Miami last year. But letting Harden leave in free agency – Houston is a rumoured destination – leaves the Sixers without a point guard who averaged 21 points a game and led the NBA in assists. Pick-and-roll plays featuring Harden and Embiid were some of the most efficient offensive options of any across the league.
Nurse will need to help Embiid solve defensive approaches like the ones he used against him while coaching the Raptors.
And Nurse will be under scrutiny too. At times during this past season he seemed almost exasperated by the Raptors structural shortcomings. Early in the season, he considered Toronto’s shooting woes – the Raptors were 28th in effective field goal percentage – a blip that would correct itself as the sample size got larger.
As the season went on, the losses mounted and the shooting never changed, Nurse began citing how good the ‘looks’ that the Raptors were creating. His favourite stat was a proprietary one “expected field goal percentage” based on the quality of the opportunities Toronto was creating.
Apparently, it was quite good, even as the misses mounted.
He won’t have that option with the Sixers. Under any construction, the expectation for Nurse will be to get Embiid to the NBA Finals and beyond and keep doing it as long as the Sixers star is in uniform and in his prime.
That’s the pleasure, pressure, and price of coaching NBA superstars. That’s what Nurse is signing up for.
COMMENTS
When submitting content, please abide by our submission guidelines, and avoid posting profanity, personal attacks or harassment. Should you violate our submissions guidelines, we reserve the right to remove your comments and block your account. Sportsnet reserves the right to close a story’s comment section at any time.