Film Study: Nick Nurse Vs. The Sixers In The Playoffs... What Can We Learn?
Mike O’Connor is the best O’Connor in basketball writing. Previously of The Athletic, you can find Mike on Twitter @MOConnor_NBA. Mike’s writing is brought to you by Body Bio, supplements based on science, focusing on your gut and brain health. Get 20% off E-Lyte, Gut+, and all Body Bio products with promo code FIRECJ at Body Bio’s website.
One of the many interesting things about the Sixers hiring Nick Nurse is the amount of familiarity not only that he has with the team, but that the fanbase has with him. I can’t remember any previous examples of a team having faced a coach in the playoffs multiple times over the course of four years, and then hiring that coach for themselves – it certainly hasn’t happened with the Sixers, and I can’t think of any recent examples from other teams.
Since the Sixers hired him, I’ve been rewatching a fair amount of the 2019 and 2022 playoff series between the Sixers and Raptors in hopes of getting a better feel for Nurse. I’ve also re-read a lot of my writing from that 2019 series, including some collaborations with Blake Murphy, which have provided some film that I’ll re-share here. Here in this piece, I’ll break down that film once again and give a bit of a running diary of my takeaways from those two series. Let’s begin.
I wrote at the time that I believed Brett Brown outcoached Nurse in the 2019 series, and looking back now, I still believe that to be true. With that being said, Nurse obviously deserves some credit for his ability to counter the chess moves that Brown threw at him.
One of the biggest adjustments Brown made in that series was having Joel Embiid guard Pascal Siakam starting in Game 2 of that series. That has generally been considered a win for Brown and the Sixers, but not for lack of effort from Nurse. He tried many things to make the Sixers pay for that matchup, including using Siakam as a screener far more often in order to exploit Embiid’s sagging off of Siakam. These double drag screens in transition made Embiid pay after he’d started making a habit of giving Siakam lots of space.
Nurse also ran guard-big pick and rolls for Siakam, which they had some success with, as it’s not exactly an action that Embiid is used to defending from that position.
Outside of those types of actions, Nurse essentially made Siakam operate as the de facto center, setting screens and dribble hand-offs in order to prevent Embiid from simply roaming off of him. The matchup still played out in the Sixers’ favor, but it wasn’t for any fault of Nurse, as Siakam just bricked lots of open looks.
The other thing that stands out from that series is that the Raptors played an awful lot of double-big lineups with Serge Ibaka and Marc Gasol. I found this quite interesting, as Nurse has generally developed a reputation as a coach who favors small-ball lineups built around 6-8 wings. But in this particular case, he found it necessary to counter the Sixers’ size, and was willing to stick with what perhaps is not his stylistic preference. One also wonders if this means Nurse might be willing to explore lineups with Embiid at center and Paul Reed at the four. But I digress.
I still look back on that series and can find a number of things that Nurse did wrong. As I wrote at the time, he didn’t try hard enough to hunt JJ Redick on defense. He wasn’t aggressive enough in having defenders help off of Ben Simmons in the half court. It took them two games to properly counter the Embiid-Siakam matchup. And, overall, the Raptors played some pretty bland defensive schemes that allowed the Sixers to get comfortable – there was very little zone or gimmicky defense that he has become known for in years since. Many of the things that he gets credit for in that playoff run came in the subsequent series – like their aggressive help schemes against Giannis Antetokounmpo and the box and one on Steph Curry.
In the second series, three years later, those gimmicky schemes were all over the place. The difference between how the Raptors defended Embiid in those two series is extremely notable. In 2019, there was a lot of single coverage with Marc Gasol being trusted to guard Embiid. In 2022, there were double teams galore and lots of borderline gimmick defenses.
To be frank, I wasn’t much of a fan of Nurse’s tactics early on in that series – he was too aggressive, and it led to blowout wins for the Sixers in each of the first two games. He was unfathomably aggressive in sending help in the gaps against Harden and Embiid, and that allowed Maxey to exploit them, and explode for big performances in each of the first two games. You just can’t give Maxey this type of space off the ball. These result in easy driving lanes or jumpers:
To his credit, he did dial things back a bit later in the series, which played a key role in the Raptors’ comeback. Overall, despite his mistakes early in the series, I would say Nurse out-coached Doc Rivers – even if not necessarily from a tactical perspective. He out-coached him in the sense that his team consistently played hard, stayed connected, and made the right decisions throughout the entire series. The Sixers, predictably, took their foot off the gas after they went up 3-0, and the Raptors were able to claw their way back into the series – because Nurse’s teams are always tough, resilient, and never quit, and that was never the case for Rivers’ teams while he was here.
Personnel likely plays a bigger role in that than many would like to admit, but still, I give Nurse far better odds of creating that type of team identity than Rivers had. It fits his demeanor and approach far more so than it does that of Rivers.
After rewatching chunks of those two series, I would say that any Sixers fan who is hoping for Nurse to wave a wand and implement magical tactical changes is being overly optimistic. Nurse is innovative, nimble, and smart, but I’d caution any fan who is watching Erik Spoelstra perform dark magic on a nightly basis and hoping that Nurse can do the same thing here.
Against the Sixers, Nurse has done a good, but unspectacular job of making tactical adjustments throughout a playoff series. In both 2019 and 2022 against the Sixers, there were obvious things that he either got wrong or left on the table. In neither case did it feel like he was making chess moves that the Sixers’ coaches couldn’t keep up with.
Where I do expect Nurse to be better is fostering a stronger team identity and bringing whatever reserve of toughness was left on the table during Rivers’ time here. I trust him to create a much better team identity that has better habits and more consistent energy levels than what we’ve seen in these past few years – and that, to me, is the most important thing. These recent Sixers teams have lost their composure, focus, and effort levels far too often, and Nurse is all about implementing a culture that emphasizes those things. Is he a player development savant? No. A tactical magician? Sort of, but not really. But is he a hard-ass who cares about the right things and creates strong team identities? Yes – and that’s the most important thing.