Toronto Raptors: How the Raptors build a championship team

Nick Nurse

Deciding on the Raptors’ next head coach is probably the biggest decision Ujiri had ever had to make as an NBA Executive. It was, without a doubt, the biggest and most critical as part of the Toronto Raptors’ front office.

And it would be hard to imagine the stakes being higher. Ujiri had just fired the NBA’s coach of the year after the teams best regular season in franchise history. If things went wrong it’s not unreasonable to conclude that Masai Ujiri’s job would be on the line.

On June 14, 2018, Nick Nurse was officially named as the Raptors new head coach. And in this decision, we come to another juncture where it seems like the Force must have been at work in Masai Ujiri’s decision making.

Nurse had never been an NBA head coach. In Masai’s position, conventional wisdom would probably have been to go with experience. That’s not to say that Nurse hadn’t had any head coaching experience. Nick Nurse got his very first college head coaching gig at Grand View University when he was only 23 years old.

His resume also includes 11 seasons as a head coach in Europe including two championships in the British Basketball League and a championship with the Iowa Energy, an NBA D-League team (now the G-League). But the NBA is the holy grail of basketball, not just for players and executives, but for coaches as well. It’s on another level, so Nurse’s head coaching experience was far from a guarantee that he would be the right pick for the Raptors.

As it turns out though, I think that Nurse was a perfect choice. And not just because for the first time in franchise history, the Raptors’ season ended with a win. In fact, I will go so far as to say that if anyone else had been the head coach during the 2018- 19 season, it’s a very real possibility that the Raptors would not be reigning NBA Champions.

We’ll get into that more a little bit later.