Five Things to Like About Nick Nurse

Nurse may or may not ultimately be the guy, but there's enough good -- exciting? -- stuff there for me to be vibrating on the frequency of his hiring.

Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard. 

Andrew's writing is brought to you by Kinetic Skateboarding! Not only the Ricky's approved skate shop, but the best place to get Chucks, Vans, any apparel. Use code "DAVESILVER" for 9.1% off your order.

---

Hellloooooo Nurse. Sixers fans got to meet the franchise's 26th head coach Thursday afternoon, with a relatively nothing press conference most notable for a non-answer to a James Harden question (which Spike's dad immediately called him out for non-answering). If there was some soundbite that represents something like a big-picture takeaway from the presser, it would probably be his bizarrely phrased "I don't really vibrate on the frequency of the past" quote -- which, as both a Process-era Sixers fan and a guy who spent Memorial Day Weekend with friends listening to a self-made countdown of the Top 100 Alternative Rock Songs of 2003, I can't say I find particularly relatable. But he seemed fine. All you really want from a coach's introductory press conference is that they seem fine. 

Generally, Nick Nurse seems fine. Maybe even a little bit exciting? It never makes a ton of sense to get too excited about a coaching hire; by definition, if one of these guys is available in the first place, it's either because they've never done it before, haven't done it in a long time, or were just concluded by their old team to be unable to do it currently. But the Nick Nurse hiring is at least slightly exciting, mostly for the same reason that the Daryl Morey hiring was slightly exciting: It seems like the move that a smart team would make. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily the smart play for the Sixers -- and honestly, if you asked me to bet one way or the other between it working as well as we hope or busting out in spectacular fashion, I'd probably find some bullshit coward way to hedge on it -- but for now, as much as anything can feel good with the Sixers right now, this feels pretty good. 

Here are five things that I'm liking about Nick Nurse as the next Sixers head coach at the moment. 

1. He's done the thing before (and quickly). It's kind of wild how many of the biggest guys competing for open coaching positions league-wide right now do have a ring to their name -- Mike Budenholzer, Frank Vogel, even our own guy with the MD -- which maybe shows you how little equity a championship win on the resumé gets you these days. Fair enough, but the thing that I particularly like about Nurse is that he won his in Toronto in his first year in charge, with a team that was wildly different than the year before. If the Sixers do win with Nurse, it's not gonna be like the Bucks with Bud, where after years and years of banging their head against the conference finals with roughly the same core, they finally break through: If they don't win pretty quickly, possibly with a totally revamped roster, they're probably not gonna win at all. Our next head coach was always gonna have to be a fast learner, adapter and bonder, and Nurse has proven he can be all those things.

And though Nurse hasn't won much in the years since 2019, I don't think you could say he's developed much in the way of loser energy since then -- certainly not in the particularly Sixersy way that Doc had in his time since taking the chip with the Celtics. When his teams have lost, it's been in fairly unremarkable fashion, and generally because they were facing teams with significantly more talent than them. He had the misfortune of winning when his best player was a rental; if Kawhi stuck around, maybe he wins another ring or two in Toronto and he becomes their Erik Spoelstra. But his teams were always to good to totally rebuild and not good enough to totally compete, and that's usually how coaches get fired. (That and generally being a pain in the ass, which Nurse may also be, but the brunt of that probably won't come for another couple years anyway.) 

2. He's not Mike D'Antoni. I really can't tell you -- though I've certainly tried -- how furious I was gonna be if we went with D'Antoni for this. Even if he really was the best guy for the job (which I think would be a highly contestable position regardless), picking MDA for this would have just shown such a frustrating lack of imagination on Daryl Morey's behalf, such an insulting repudiation of basic pattern recognition, and just such a predictable gravitation towards what sort of mostly worked a half-decade ago that it might've legitimately been tougher for me to walk off than even the Game Seven loss. If it had gone badly -- if it had gone anything less than spectacularly -- it would have not only been impossibly fucking embarrassing us as fans, it would've (further) permanently soiled the reputations for coach, player and exec, and justifiably so. 

And maybe in his heart of hearts, Daryl still kinda wanted to pull the trigger on Round Two with MDA, wanting to believe that finally the time and circumstance would've been right for the two of them and Harden to at long last get over the hump and validate everything the trio always believed about themselves and each other. And I get that. But at a certain point, as an adult professional whose judgment and credibility has already proven less than infallible, you just have to do yourself the favor of not putting yourself in position to potentially look like the biggest goddamn chump on the planet. If nothing else, I respect that Daryl at least had the good sense to take the less perilous path on this one. 

3. His hat thing opens up a lot of possibilities for Nine Inch Nails puns. I can't remember if it was ever confirmed that the lowercase "nn" on Nick Nurse's trademark hats was intended as a Nine Inch Nails reference, but it certainly looked like one, and I certainly plan on treating it like one. (Though I don't get why he didn't co the full NiN route with it -- his first name even starts with an "Ni"!!) Anyway, I dunno if you've scrolled through that band's Wiki discography recently, but just about every album or single sounds like a potential chapter title for the eventual Process-era Sixers anthology: "Hurt," The Downward Spiral, "Into the Void," Broken, "Something I Can Never Have," "Every Day Is Exactly the Same," Further Down the Spiral, and so on and so on. Needless to say, you can be damn sure I'mma get my money's worth with those over the next few seasons. 

4. He's not a choice made with James Harden in mind. This is maybe just another way of saying "He's not Mike D'Antoni," but I particularly like that nothing about the messaging surrounding Nurse's hiring appears to be designed to pander to James Harden. As Spike and Mike discussed on the pod, it felt pretty conspicuous that the Woj article breaking the Nurse news specifically talked about his vision for building the team around Embiid -- and this week at the presser, Nurse's answer about wanting Harden back was essentially a committedly non-committal "well, I don't not want him to re-sign here, y'know, if that's what he wants." And in general, if you're looking to sell Harden on staying, I don't know if getting the guy who emphasizes offensive movement and pace and publicly calls out his guys when they don't play defense is necessarily the most convincing pitch. 

I don't know if that means that Harden is for sure not coming back next year; it might be wishful thinking to assume as much, at least for those of us who are now fairly convinced the team's best way forward is without him at this point. But it does mean that they're not prioritizing re-signing him at all costs, and that they're making it clear to him that other considerations with this team ultimately come first -- which they really really should be doing, and which is arguably more important than whether or not he ultimately re-signs anyway.

5. He's gonna try Paul Reed at the four. I'm only exaggerating a little bit when I say that for me, this is the most important thing about the Nick Nurse pick. I don't know what his reputation for outside-the-box thinking will eventually lead him to with the Sixers in the big-picture sense, but I know that at some point, somehow, some way, we are getting some goddamn Paul Reed at the four minutes. Hell, we might get some Paul Reed at the two minutes before all is said and done; the Raptors team Nurse comes from was seemingly exclusively stocked with Paul Reed types and he seemed to have no compunction about playing as many of them at once as he goddamn pleased. Nurse may end up having something of a love-hate relationship with a player as occasionally maddening as BBall, and may yank him from the rotation for weeks at a time out of frustration with his inconsistency (though at least he probably won’t lean on any Montrezl Harrell types in his stead either). But I can't imagine a universe in which he doesn't at least try him next to Joel at some point. 

And while that's important in and of itself -- we absolutely need to be able to put some lineups with actual energy and juice around Jo, for at least a stretch or two a game -- it's maybe even more representative for what it represents. I don't think Doc was ultimately a bad coach, necessarily, just one limited by a fairly circumscribed vision of coaching. There was never any chance of him playing Paul Reed at the four, because seemingly, in his mind, that just wasn't how basketball worked. It's exciting to have a guy on the sidelines who's willing to subscribe to a certain amount of "Why not?" in his coaching, who might do stuff not because he knows exactly how it should turn out, but because he honestly has no idea what it might look like and is willing to find out. The Sixers have never really had that guy, and even if Nurse proves a disaster, it's nice to have a legitimately new feeling to look forward to when everything else about this team feels so dreadfully inevitable right now.