The Philadelphia 76ers are moving into a new era after bringing in Nick Nurse to replace the fired Doc Rivers. The Sixers went 154-82 under Rivers’ guidance and he did a lot of good things in Philadelphia, but three consecutive exits in the semifinals sealed his fate.
In comes Nurse who will look to bring his innovative thinking to the position and try to get the Sixers over that Round 2 hump. He has a career record of 227-163 across his four seasons with the Toronto Raptors and he led the team to their first NBA title in 2019.
Now is the time to dissect the Nurse hire. It’s time to see which areas Toronto thrived and where they didn’t during his time and how he can help the Sixers get to a championship.
Defensive philosophy
The Raptors weren’t a particularly stifling defensive team during Nurse’s time in Toronto, but when they had the personnel (i.e. Marc Gasol), they were toward the top in defensive rating. They were 2nd in that category in the 2019-20 season, the first year without Kawhi Leonard, and it allowed them to come to within a win of going back to the Eastern Conference finals that season.
Nurse is not afraid to try different things on the defensive end. He will employ a lot of zone defenses and allow guys like De’Anthony Melton and Tobias Harris to just fly around there on defense while Joel Embiid is set to protect the rim. He will encourage players to be overzealous on that end of the floor and be active from the get-go in order to fuel their offense.
Innovation
As mentioned, Nurse will try plenty of different defensive schemes. The zone, an aggressive full-court press when the time calls for it, and even a box-and-one in order to get stops any way they can. Either way, the Sixers promise to now be an aggressive, trapping, and blitzing type of defensive team under Nurse. That then leads to easy transition opportunities for guys like Maxey and Harden to score easy points.
Raptors vice chairman and president Masai Ujiri told reporters about Nurse’s style:
(He’s a) mad scientist. That’s all I can say. Every day he’s thinking. He lives, he sleeps, he drinks the game. Always thinking of all the things that, hopefully, can give us an edge to win.
Offensive philosophy
As far as the half-court offense goes, Toronto ranked 12th in the half-court as they averaged 115.9 points per 100 possessions per Cleaning the Glass. Not an overly impressive number, but when considering the Raptors were ranked 28th in 3-point percentage at 33.5% per basketball-reference, it means they were able to get some type of offensive flow despite the poor shooting numbers.
The Sixers have much more reliable shooters on their roster when considering they have the likes of Tyrese Maxey, Melton, Harris, and James Harden (?) to rely on. If Nurse was able to get the Raptors to have half-court success, one has to believe he should be able to get a lot out of the Sixers. The spacing the Sixers produce for Embiid will allow them to have that success needed on the offensive end.
Profile
Nurse is a native of Carroll, Iowa and he has experience coaching in the British Basketball League for 11 seasons and he has experience coaching in the D-League (now known as the G League). He has the drive and passion to succeed in whatever position he’s in and that will help the Sixers.
As an example of what Nurse has done with his life, SportsNet Canada offered up a story about him starting the Iowa Energy while he was just looking for a coaching job anywhere:
Nurse pulled off the interstate at the next exit and looped around to where he’d seen the building. Wells Fargo Arena, a 16,000-seat facility he would eventually come to know intimately, had been completed the previous July. Nurse pulled into the parking lot and started making calls from his car. He got through to the arena’s general manager, who told him the building’s only permanent resident was a minor-league hockey team and, well, they’d love to host some basketball. Nurse took that bit of momentum and threw it into his next few calls.
He started with the NBA head office, where he was told to try the D-League office, where he was eventually put through to the league’s president, Phil Evans, who heard his pitch and agreed that Des Moines was the perfect place for an expansion franchise. Evans was on board, but Nurse still didn’t have a team lined up. “OK, they want to do it and they want to do it,” he thought to himself when the last call wrapped. “Now what am I supposed to do?”
It was a friend and fellow coach named Orv Salmon who suggested Nurse reach out to Jerry Crawford. An Iowa lawyer and Democratic Party lobbyist, Crawford ducked Nurse initially, trying to pawn him off on other members of his firm. “I said, ‘It’s gotta be Jerry and I can’t tell anyone else what it is,’” Nurse remembers. “[Crawford] finally got on the phone and his direct quote was, ‘Not another f—ing minor-league basketball team.’ But he said, ‘Come on down.’” A year later, the Crawford-owned Iowa Energy took the floor at The Well for their inaugural season with Nurse at the head of the bench.
Final grade: A
Nurse connects well with his players and that will be needed in Philadelphia. His ability to come up with schemes and be able to listen and hear his players out will be valuable as he looks to take the Sixers to new heights.
Story originally appeared on Sixers Wire