How Nick Nurse’s ‘big picture’ coaching vision was 30 years in the making

It’s not that difficult to like Nick Nurse. All you have to do is meet him, and that’s before you even know his backstory. Nurse has been an NBA head coach for all of one year now and already has a championship to show for it.

Twelve months ago he was a largely unknown coaching nomad who took over the Toronto Raptors when Dwayne Casey was relieved of his duties two days after being named coach of the year. But as the team arrived in Tokyo last week to play two exhibition games against the Houston Rockets, the coach of the defending NBA champs was in as much demand as any of his players.

In what is likely to be a surreal moment for Nurse, the Raptors are set to tip off the NBA regular season on Tuesday in Toronto against the New Orleans Pelicans with the raising of the championship banner and a ring ceremony.

When asked about his odyssey over the past year, going from an unknown commodity to NBA champ, he pauses slightly to reflect. “Odyssey is a good word for it.”

Over the past 30 years, Nurse has coached 15 different teams in five different countries.

He spent 11 years in the British Basketball League as well as one year each in Italy and Belgium. And worked for three NCAA teams as well as a couple of minor league outfits before finally making it to the NBA as an assistant with the Raptors.

Every team Nurse was involved in had one thing in common: they won. However, because he had no NBA playing pedigree – he was a middling college guard at Northern Iowa – Nurse’s apprenticeship lasted more than a quarter of a century. Most men would have moved on, but not Nurse.

“He’s very locked-in in the moment, but he also knows where he wants to be big picture,” Nurse’s nephew David, a life skills coach who has worked with NBA players, told Sportsnet last year. “He knew big picture he was going to be an NBA head coach. He’d tell people that. Even if people did not believe in him, he never lost any belief in himself.”

The Raptors had become regular-season powerhouses and postseason pushovers when team brass decided to bring Nurse aboard. He knew he would have to cut his chops in the play-offs or his NBA career could be a short one. But when the Raptors acquired one of the top three players in the game in Kawhi Leonard just before the season started, the pressure was really on.

Still, you would never have known it by looking at Nurse. Scholarly and composed, his disposition was the perfect antidote for a team desperate to take the next step. Even now, four months after the Raptors beat the seemingly insurmountable Golden State Warriors, the magnitude of the achievement is just starting to sink in.

“As each week ticks by, it kind of starts sinking in a little bit more,” he said. “Yesterday I got on the plane and the first thing that comes up on the screen is a 30-minute documentary about the finals. I haven’t seen any of this stuff, and they have microphones and cameras in the locker room and everywhere. I’m listening to one of my half-time speeches and thinking, did I say that? I don’t remember. But as time goes by it starts to sink in a little bit and its pretty wild man.”

I tell Nurse next time I’m back home in Canada, I want to run with him because he will never have to buy a drink in the country again. “I have to admit, everyone in Canada was super excited,” he said. “It’s wild, really wild wherever we go man. But it’s great.”

Nurse had little time to soak up the adulation, however, as he was named coach of Canada’s national team and led them into the World Basketball Championship in China this summer, in hopes of qualifying for next summer’s Olympics in Tokyo.

But despite having more NBA players than any country outside the US, the Canadian roster was decimated by withdrawals and injuries and the team failed to qualify. Apparently, Canada basketball has a number of solid commitments in line to play in one final Olympic qualifying tournament next summer.

I mention to the guitar aficionado that if he is looking for a good blues bar to jam at while in Tokyo next summer, I got him covered. “Yes sir, yes sir,” he quickly replies. “We are planning on being here man.” At this stage, it’s hard to argue with the man’s big picture vision.