TORONTO – It’s a long way from coaching in England’s unremarkable pro basketball league to Game 1 of the NBA Finals. And it's a great distance from coaching small college ball and sleeping on dorm-room floors while coaching at summer camps to trying to dethrone the Golden State Warriors.
The metaphorical miles can’t be measured, even from G League head coach to NBA head coach.
But here Nick Nurse is, leading the Toronto Raptors against the Warriors with an NBA championship on the line.
“In the mid-’90s, I had just become the head coach at Barton County Community College, and I offered Nick the assistant’s job,” East Tennessee State coach Steve Forbes said.
“He said, ‘I want to pursue this professional dream. I want to be an NBA coach someday.’ And that’s what he did. He was focused on that being his career path. It was probably a road less traveled but it was a road that worked for him.”
Head coach Nick Nurse of the Toronto Raptors. (Photo: Gregory Shamus, Getty Images)
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Nurse, 51, has guided the Raptors to the franchise’s first appearance in the Finals in his first season as an NBA head coach. He spent the previous five seasons with the Raptors as an assistant coach for Dwane Casey. When Casey was dismissed, Toronto president Masai Ujiri turned to Nurse.
“Being a first-year head coach there's going to be an adjustment period, and I think he's done remarkably well, even using some of his past experiences,” Ujiri said. “He talks about the G League, he talks about Europe.”
The four coaches in the Finals the past five seasons reached the Finals in their first season: Steve Kerr with Golden State, David Blatt and Tyronn Lue with Cleveland and Nurse with Toronto.
Nurse grew up in Iowa, played at Northern Iowa and after college, he began his coaching career, first as a player-coach for the Derby Storm in England and then as head coach for NAIA Grand View University (Des Moines, Iowa).
Toronto Raptors head coach Nick Nurse. (Photo: Tom Szczerbowski, USA TODAY Sports)
There is no such thing as a normal path to a head-coaching job in the NBA, but Nurse took a path he felt could get him where he wanted even if it meant coaching in low-level, far-flung locales: Birmingham, Manchester and Brighton, England; Ostend, Belgium; Vermillion, South Dakota.
“My goal early in becoming a head coach so young was to find out if I could do it,” Nurse said. “I just wanted to see if I could be a good head coach and then start learning from head coaching.
“So, all those stops – I don't know how many years it was, 18, 20 years – of being a head coach, and in some pretty remote places, was still a valuable learning experience for me from just running and managing the team and being up in front of a team and preparing scouting reports and trying to figure out chemistry and lineups and schemes.”
Ujiri, who played pro basketball in England in the mid-’90s, remembers Nurse being the talk of the league because he was such a young head coach.
“We're a hardworking team, and Nick has that persona and that ethic that really translates to everybody and the whole organization,” Ujiri said.
Though Nurse had talent to work with, especially when the Raptors traded for Kawhi Leonard, he still had to navigate difficult situations this season, specifically management of Leonard’s playing time (he played in just 60 games).
“Nick has just been one to never complain," Ujiri said. “It's always ‘How does he adjust? How does he use what he has with the players?’ And to me that's one thing that has really stood out with him, and he's done a remarkable job.”
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