There’s rarely a single reason a team parts ways with a coach and that was certainly the case with the Toronto Raptors and Nick Nurse. But while an assortment of factors went into the decision, it was hard to miss the one thing team president Masai Ujiri kept coming back to while speaking to the media on the day Nurse was fired: The vibes need to change.
Ujiri pointed to the final game the Raptors played this year — a 109-105 home-court play-in loss to the Chicago Bulls in which Toronto squandered a nine-point fourth-quarter lead — as a sort of microcosm of big-picture problems.
“I think that game summed up what has gone on in this organization,” he said. “The feel, the spirit of who we really are…it’s been very disappointing for us and we want to gain momentum back as a team.”
While the loss to the Bulls may have put a fine point on the issue, Ujiri certainly saw the cracks and fissures well before that. Coming off a year in which they were a surprise fifth-place finisher in the Eastern Conference, the Raptors — who finished .500 on the nose at 41-41 — seemed out of sync and disjointed basically from the tip this past season.
“You could see it throughout the year,” Ujiri noted. “There was never that full excitement, there was never that full spirit, there was never that feel of togetherness. We all saw it. You saw it. It’s not something we’re making up here. We’d win two and all of a sudden it goes the other way. You seem like you’re gaining and all of a sudden it goes the other way.
“It’s not one person or one finger to point and there’s no pointing the finger at Nick. I have to take responsibility for this, too, and as a leader of this organization I will always do that.
At times, Ujiri sounded like the parent of a teenager who made an out-of-character bad choice: “It wasn’t us this year. This year wasn’t us, I think everybody saw that.”
Nurse, of course, took over the head coaching duties in 2018-19, when the Raps went on to win the only championship in franchise history. Four years later, Ujiri talked about the need to validate that title by becoming an elite squad again — and he didn’t hide from the fact getting those fantastic vibes back requires ground-shifting action.
“I think it’s by making major changes sometimes and this is a major change we’ve made,” Ujiri said when asked how Toronto can recapture a winning culture. “There are things you have to shock, you have to hit. There has to be some kind of friction. The culture here has been [good historically]. Honestly, we love it, it’s incredible. I think we follow the culture of an incredible city: people; humility, everything we stand for here — togetherness — and we lost some of that. But I don’t think it’s something we cannot build right back up again.
“Some of this stuff, sometimes not wining pronounces it a little bit more, but we believe we’ll get right back — even if it’s slowly — as an organization and as a team.”
