Nick Nurse wins NBA Coach of the Year Honours

There was a moment a quarter century ago when Toronto Raptors coach Nick Nurse almost quit coaching basketball.

He was over in England at the time, in his second year with the Birmingham Bullets, when his team started the season 8-8. It was a message, he thought, maybe he just wasn’t cut out for coaching.

“I went back to my hotel thinking maybe I should pack up and go home,” he said. “I wrote down four other things I thought I might like doing.”

In his late 20s, the prospect of going into real estate, opening a recreation center, or using his accounting degree all looked “like absolute sh*t,” he said. So he decided to regroup and hang with it.

That year something magical happened, if you believe in such things. The Bullets finished the year on a 16-2 run, qualified for the playoffs and won the British Basketball League championship. In hindsight, it the pivotal year in Nurse’s young coaching career. Instead of quitting, he decided to stick with it. Now, almost 25 years later, that young man who stuck with his dream, reached the peak of his profession, earning NBA Coach of the Year Honors on Saturday.

Nurse’s coaching career is the stuff of movies. He’s crisscrossed the world from the United States to England and Belgium. On the way, he coached at nearly every level believing that any opportunity to be a head coach anywhere is invaluable.

“I’m not so sure where we’re sitting now, I knew what the heck I was doing,” Nurse said. “I didn’t know what path I was on.”

When he finally broke through as an NBA coach, he took over a team coming off a 59-23 season after the recently named NBA Coach of the Year Dwayne Casey was fired. Then, almost exactly a year to the day of his promotion, he led the Raptors to their first NBA championship. A year later, he coached Toronto to a 53-19 record with a 73.6% win percentage, the highest in franchise history despite injuries to every single key contributor.

For the media, there was hardly any question who should be the Coach of the Year. The 53-year-old Nurse earned 90 first place votes and appeared on 98 of the 100 media ballots cast. And yet, when he appeared on TNT’s Inside the NBA on Saturday afternoon, he said he had no idea he was going to be named the award’s recipient. It wasn’t until his high school coach, Wayne Chandlee from Kuemper Catholic School, showed up that he connected the dots.

“It was really nice,” Nurse said of seeing his old high school coach. “He really understood the game from a fundamental standpoint, and we guarded. Our high school team guarded because he demanded it. And showed us how to do it. That obviously has stuck with me a little bit.”

Then Kyle Lowry and Fred VanVleet appeared to surprise Nurse with the award.

.@Klow7 and @FredVanVleet present Nick Nurse with the 2019-20 NBA Coach of the Year award! 🙌#NBAAwards pic.twitter.com/x80foNIFSF
— NBA on TNT (@NBAonTNT) August 22, 2020

“It just doesn’t happen [without them],” Nurse said. “It’s a real organizational-type award. I said that when we went to coach the All-Star Game, too, but it’s true. You’re not given that award without guys like Kyle and Fred, Serge and Marc, Pascal and OG, all the way down that are going out there and performing on the court every night. You’re not getting an award without a great staff.”

There’s no question that the Raptors have become one of the NBA’s best organizations from top down, but a lot of that hard work goes to Nurse and the way he’s run things for the past two years.

“When you see Nick on the sidelines, that’s who he is as a person. Relaxed, but so hard-working. Creative and dynamic. Always setting the tone for our team – attacking our next championship, rather than defending our last,” Raptors President Masai Ujiri said in a press release. “That is who Nick is, that is why we believe in him. His journey to this tremendous honour has been a long one – we are so happy to see him recognized this way.”

Since taking over in June 2018, Nurse has become one of the NBA’s best coaches because of his willingness to buck convention and try new things. He showed it on the world stage when he decided to go with a box-and-one defence to stop Stephen Curry in the NBA Finals, taking flack for the decision despite the fact that it worked. It’s been a hallmark of the Raptors, who deploy the league’s most unconventional and adaptable defences.

That philosophy goes back to his early days, coaching in those small gyms around the world with little to no attention.

“I think that my training gave me a chance to try a lot of different things,” he said. “I thought if I ever got a chance to become a head coach, a lot of the things that I tried in some of those back-water places I thought maybe would still work.”

Had that miracle Bullets season gone the other way, there’s no telling where Nurse would be today. He’d be one of the thousands of young men and women who give up on their coaching aspirations because the path forward seems uncertain or bleak. Instead, he stuck with it because his love for the game and his desire to help those around him has never wavered.