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…
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.”
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).
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.
