TORONTO — In the end it was cordial — even casual — but also, inevitable.
No feelings were hurt. No bitterness lingered. Everyone involved could agree: It was time.
While Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri met with the media at the OVO practice facility Friday morning to address the not-so-bombshell-bombshell that Nick Nurse had been fired just an hour earlier, the 2020-21 NBA coach of the year was tidying up loose ends around his office and getting ready to leave the building, having completed his fourth meeting in the space of a week, the last one resulting in him being relieved of his duties. And Nurse quite likely was relieved.
His final words to his now ex-boss were sincere: “Good luck with those guys.”
It won’t be his last time at OVO Centre this summer as Nurse remains the head coach of the men’s national team and will have access to the building when Canada trains there. Any new job he gets will have contingencies accommodating his national team commitment this summer at the FIBA Basketball World Cup and next summer at the Olympics.
And chances are Nurse will be back at Scotiabank Arena sooner than later. As one general manager said to me: “If he wants a job, he’ll get a job.”
And when he returns? His run didn’t end as well as anyone hoped, but he won a title, led the team to perhaps its most satisfying regular season a year later without Kawhi Leonard to lean on and pulled a team from the draft lottery in 2020-21 to 47 wins and the fifth seed in 2021-22. He loved the limelight, was active in charity work, stepped in to coach the national team when the need was greatest and somehow pulled off wearing hats with his own initials.
It was — as he said early this month when news of his possible departure was brewing — “a good run.”
The Raptors plan to take their time in their search but want to have someone in place by the NBA Draft on June 22. Former Celtics coach Ime Udoka has been linked to the Raptors position, but Ujiri says the process is just starting, and multiple candidates will be considered.
As for Ujiri and Nurse?
The two men had done a lot of winning together, but the past season had been trying for both, with tension bubbling at various stages, the frustration of a season falling short of expectations weighing on everyone involved.
There was hope that by revisiting its ebbs and flows in painstaking detail, a way forward might be realized, but it wasn’t long before it was apparent that a new voice and a new set of eyes would best serve the Raptors’ needs and a new opportunity would best serve Nurse, who can hand over his resume with a championship ring on his finger and a proven ability to win NBA games at the highest level of competition.
He’ll have a chance at a multi-million-dollar contract over as many as five years at his next stop, that type of security wasn’t going to be available in Toronto where Nurse had one year and $8 million left on his deal and at best was looking at another year being added on if the two sides had agreed to give things another try.
If he plays his cards right — and depending on which jobs pop open — Nurse might find himself with a team on the cusp of a title again, or a young one loaded with lottery picks.
The Raptors are neither at the moment, and without a clear path to breaking out of Eastern Conference mediocrity, though that’s Ujiri’s burden now. He says he doesn’t want to break up his team and rebuild, but figuring out a way forward will be a challenge.
For his part, Ujiri couldn’t or wouldn’t put a fine point on why he felt he had to move on from the head coach he tapped from Dwane Casey’s staff in the summer of 2018 for the top job and then watched as the veteran of years in what Nurse called ‘the minor leagues’ led a veteran roster to a 58-win season and a rollicking ride through the playoffs, culminating with a win over the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals.
But five years later and on the heels of a ninth-place finish and a 41-41 record Ujiri certainly didn’t mince words when it came to listing — over the course of a 45-minute press conference — what he believed were some of the short-comings.
“Complacency” and “selfishness” are never good adjectives to have attached to your team if you’re a head coach, but those were among the most prominent that Ujiri used to describe the atmosphere around a team that he said went off the rails with consecutive blowout losses on the road against the New Orleans Pelicans and the Brooklyn Nets in late November and was never able to quite get on solid footing again, notwithstanding a 15-10 finish with trade deadline acquisition of Jakob Poeltl as starting centre.
But to hear Ujiri tell it, the losing was merely a symptom. The underlying illness was the “disease of me” and if it all wasn’t on Nurse that it found a foothold on his watch. That he couldn’t come up with the proper prescription for it was the ultimate deal breaker.
Like a lot of fans, Ujiri didn’t like watching the 2022-23 edition of the Raptors play.
“You could see it throughout the year. There was never that full excitement. There was never that full spirit,” said Ujiri. “There was never that (feeling) of togetherness. We all saw it. You all saw it. It’s not something we are making up here… It’s not one person or one finger to point. I’m not pointing the finger at Nick. I have to take responsibility for this, too. As the leader of this organization, I will do that. It wasn’t us. This year wasn’t us. I think everybody saw that.”
Another sore point was the Raptors’ lack of contribution from their bench as Nurse relied on his starters more than any team in the NBA for two straight years and had bench units that ranked last in the league in offensive efficiency in each of those years. This rankled a front office that had — quite literally — built a championship team through shrewd drafting, player development, depth and not a single lottery pick on the roster for the first time in NBA history.
The obvious pushback was that trying to play winning basketball with Justin Champagnie, Ron Harper Jr., Dalano Banton, Malachi Flynn, Precious Achiuwa, Jeff Dowtin Jr., Christian Koloko and the other new faces to join the organization since 2018 is a different proposition than bringing along the elite collection of talent the Raptors were able to add to the organization in the off-seasons from 2015-to-2017.
Management’s retort? The new kids may turn into NBA players or may not, but after two seasons of being (mostly) buried on Nurse’s bench, no one is any further along in knowing.
“…All the young players we have I think one of the things we talked about was maybe utilizing some of these players a little bit more,” said Ujiri. “Like giving them room to actually show if they have or if they don’t have (it). I think we didn’t do so well with that this year. I think that hurt us some in developing our young players.”
Ujiri added: “I think there’s talent. It just hasn’t come out yet. We’re still developing, and this takes time sometimes. Maybe we could be wrong, but we still believe in those kids as talents.”
There were other issues, per sources. An opposing assistant coach said the Raptors coaching staff — Nurse had nine assistants and four other player development or video coaches — was known to be a less than cohesive unit. Had Nurse stayed on there would likely have been sweeping changes. That in itself is hardly uncommon as NBA staffs have grown significantly in recent years and keeping everyone on the same page can be a challenging exercise. But the fact that issues were common knowledge meant management was surely aware.
As well Nurse’s ability or willingness to play the ‘heavy’ was an issue. It can be hard balance for a head coach to strike when he’s working so closely with players over such a long season. But after having significant success with a veteran-laden championship team and the 2020-21 team that relied both on its veterans and a mature young core with the likes of Fred VanVleet, Pascal Siakam and O.G. Anunoby playing key roles, Nurse wasn’t able to adjust to shaping a young group of veterans supported by a group of NBA newbies trying to find their way.
When it was time for a shakeup too often it was Ujiri who read the riot act, as he did in an early-season meeting with a slumping Scottie Barnes, or when he addressed the team about the growing selfishness problem during a film session in the lead up to the February trade deadline, or after the Raptors’ listless loss to the Utah Jazz at home after the trade deadline, according to one player.
Ujiri doesn’t shy from confrontation, and one of the justifications for firing Nurse was the need to send some shockwaves around an organization where players and staff are paid well and treated well but are expected to perform well.
But how do you rebuild a flagging culture?
“I think it’s by making major changes sometimes,” said Ujiri. “And this is a major change. You have to shock, you have to hit, there has to be a kind of friction, in some way.”
There will almost certainly be more changes, and quite possibly more friction.
Ujiri may have fired his head coach to provide a jolt to the system, but it will take more than that to elevate one of the worst shooting teams in the NBA, which lacks proven depth at crucial positions — point guard most of all — and hasn’t developed a significant contributor outside of Barnes, the fourth overall pick in 2020, since drafting Anunoby 23rd overall in 2017.
The Raptors don’t have a second-round pick until 2026 and they owe their first-round pick in 2024 to the San Antonio Spurs unless they finish with the sixth-worst record in the league or worse.
They have three pending free agents in the top six of their rotation in VanVleet, Poeltl and Gary Trent Jr., while two more — Anunoby and Siakam — will be heading into the final year of their contracts in 2023-24 and they have no realistic path to meaningful salary cap space. Their prize-free agent signing from last season — Otto Porter Jr. — played eight games before having toe surgery and hasn’t been around the team in four months.
All of which is to say, firing Nurse — which Ujiri said was difficult given their championship bond — was the most straightforward decision the Raptors had in front of them.
The rest of what comes next will be the hard part and will define a very uncertain Raptors future.
