Nick Nurse's Performance This Season Is Inexcusable
MOC has had enough of our hard-rockin' coach.
Anyone who has followed me over the years knows that I don’t tend to be overly harsh towards coaches, which I think gives me the credibility to say the following: The job Nick Nurse has done this year is one of the worst performances any Sixers coach has had in my entire lifetime. I would argue it’s by far the worst season that any coach has had since Doug Collins was fired. I’m not sure anything in today’s day and age could ever top the saboteur job that Eddie Jordan did in 2010, but Nurse’s season is a stone’s throw away from that.
The simplest way to encapsulate Nurse’s failures this season is that no matter what personnel he’s had available at any given point in the season, save for that fluky four-game winning streak, the team has performed worse than any reasonable person’s expectations say they should have. No matter who is playing on any given night, it has constantly felt like the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
The most egregious aspect of Nurse’s performance is that the Sixers simply do not run an NBA-caliber offense. It is somehow both structureless and repetitive – they run the same handful of basic actions several times per game, and outside of that, there is not even an attempt from Nurse to engineer what goes on in their half-court offense.
To be clear, as I’ve discussed in the past, running a loosely structured NBA offense is not inherently bad. If you have a truly great offensive player on your team, it’s often best not to have too much structure, as the best option is often just to give them the ball and get the hell out of the way. Mike D’Antoni famously evolved the Rockets’ offense over the course of multiple years into simply being a five-out isolation barrage for James Harden, because as he explains here, that was the most efficient version of their offense.
In a similar way, the Sixers’ offense was superb last season when Joel Embiid played – they had an offensive rating of 122.4 with Embiid on the floor last year, per Statmuse, which was better than the historically great Celtics’ offense that season. With the level that Embiid was playing at last year, you would have been insane to suggest that the Sixers should run a highly intricate, egalitarian offense.
But this season, with this personnel, including this badly compromised version of Embiid, Nurse’s unstructured offense has been a complete disaster. The Sixers currently rank 22nd in offensive rating, right behind Miami, Utah, and Chicago, who objectively have far worse personnel than the Sixers have had, even despite all their injuries. Nurse’s refusal/inability to change the DNA of their offense given this personnel is baffling; while no coach could make this group an elite offense, I’d argue that just running the Brett Brown offense would have allowed this team to leapfrog their way into the middle of the pack offensively.
Back in 2017-18, when Brown was coaching the Sixers, I used to write an article every week titled “Sixers Sets of the Week.” It contained film breakdowns of 3-5 set plays that the Sixers ran that week, including the play design, the terminology, and the etymology of the plays. And for that entire season, Brown gave me enough ammo to work with such that I never felt like I was reaching for new content or repeating old breakdowns.
If I tried to do that series this year, with Nurse as the coach, I would have run out of plays some time in November; their playbook is that simple.
Perhaps the most noteworthy contrast from someone like Brown, which truly boggles my mind, is Nurse’s inability to make use of elite shooters off the ball. In Brown’s time here, he built practically half of his offense around having JJ Redick and others fly around and/or operate as screeners off the ball. Can you remember any of Jared McCain, Eric Gordon, or Paul George setting an off-ball screen more than a handful of times this year?
Nurse’s messy track record with using shooters is nothing new. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that someone like Buddy Hield seemed like a useful rotation player immediately before and immediately after being on the Sixers, but felt largely unimpactful while he was here. Similarly, while Eric Gordon is definitely just about washed, the fact that he looked so utterly useless for the first few months of the season had plenty to do with how Nurse uses (or – doesn’t use) him.
And while I have plenty of critiques of Paul George, it’s completely inexcusable that Nurse has made such little use out of one of the best off-ball stars of his generation, especially given his age and declining ability off the dribble. The fact that George isn’t flying around setting screens off the ball, or coming off of pindowns to be able to create for himself, is something that Nurse should absorb lots of the blame for. Again – not making excuses for PG here, but I feel 100 percent certain in saying that a better coach could make this version of George look moderately less decrepit. Even if none of these shooters would see their numbers explode under a different coach, I do think it’s fair to say that Nurse’s inability to leverage their skills by involving them off the ball and having them set more screens is limiting their ability to impact the team’s offense as a whole.
On the other end of the floor, there’s a worthy conversation to be had about whether the team would be better off with a less aggressive style of defense, but the bottom line is that there is no scheme that could make this team competent defensively when they play with such lackadaisical effort on a nightly basis. They have been one of worst transition defenses all season long, if not the absolute worst, which is truly just a reflection of their effort – it’s not as if they could blame it on constantly having a plodding big man on the floor, given the amount of time that both Embiid and Andre Drummond have missed this year. They are just lazy, disconnected, and lack any sense of urgency, which is a scathing indictment of how they are responding to Nurse.
The spirit that they play with defensively is quite similar to the energy that Nurse projects on a daily basis. While his overall vibe isn’t the most damaging aspect of his job performance, it is perhaps the most annoying. Since the very start of training camp, Nurse has had a whiny, aimless, woe-is-me demeanor. Sure, all the injury drama has been annoying, and I get how that could weigh on a head coach, but part of your job is to project confidence and put out a good face to the public. It seemed to me as if from the very first bad news about Embiid at the start of the season, the wind had already been taken out of Nurse’s sails and he was never the same.
Suffice it to say, I’ve seen coaches here respond far better to unfortunate circumstances to start a season. I’m old enough to remember when the Sixers’ first overall pick forgot how to shoot a basketball, and Brett Brown still showed up every day with total confidence and self-assurance, going on to coach that team to a 52-win season that nobody saw coming. I recall watching Doc Rivers (Doc Rivers!) project total control and belief in his team in the midst of a star player holding out, demanding a trade, and blaming him for it. Nurse, on the other hand, totally faltered in the face of this year’s drama. Respectfully, if you can’t handle the drama that this year threw at you, you probably aren’t built to be the head coach of the Philadelphia 76ers.
Looking ahead, while I absolutely believe the Sixers should fire Nurse, I don’t know if they will. He is under contract, and it’s not clear to me that Josh Harris would be willing to eat that money for a team that figures to have no shot at contending for a title next season. Perhaps promoting someone from their current bench (though I have no idea who that could be) as opposed to going out and hiring another big name could make that more palatable.
In the event that he does stay, I’m going to need to see massive changes to the way that Nurse coaches the team in order to be satisfied. He needs to run a real NBA offense that can maximize this personnel grouping, which no longer features an MVP-caliber player that can shoulder the burden of a structureless offense. They need to have more than just a few basic pet plays on offense, and we need to see players like Jared McCain, Paul George, and even Tyrese Maxey be used properly off the ball.
Defensively, everything starts with getting the team to buy in on the basis of effort, but it wouldn’t hurt to see some experimentation with a more conservative scheme as well as a stronger emphasis on transition defense.
In other words: Nurse would need to completely overhaul the style in which this team plays basketball, as well as the energy that they do it with. The far more convenient solution would be to fire him and find a different coach, but if he does stay, there need to be major adjustments.
Nick Nurse is obviously not incapable of being a good coach. His performance last season was objectively fine. He won a title in Toronto in 2019, and his teams have exceeded expectations in the past, including 2020 and 2022. Lots of players that have been around him have lauded his basketball IQ as well as his locker room presence.
But sometimes, the fit between the coach and the roster just isn’t there – and rather than expecting a veteran coach to become someone else, the better solution is just to find someone else for the job. The easiest button for the Sixers to press in the wake of this failed season is the one labeled “Fire Coach,” and in this case, it would certainly be well deserved.
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.
Great piece, MOC. This is some of the best analysis of this Sixers trainwreck that I've seen, for it pinpoints exactly where Nurse has gone terribly wrong. I've said to anyone who will listen (a dwindling few now) that this team has talent, PG is not washed (Embiid is a different story), etc. but Nurse schemes or really the lack of them is dooming this team. Maxey, PG, McCain (when healthy), EG, Edwards and now Grimes should be getting plenty of plays drawn up for them. All are high-level 3 point shooters. But nope.
In many ways, aside from the Cavs and the Celtics, the East is terrible this year. Yet here the Sixers are, upteen games under .500. Can you imagine if Morey had hired Atkinson and his fun schemes compared to Nurse? That Cavs team is fun to watch, one of the precious few in this dreadful era of NBA basketball.
"With the level that Embiid was playing at last year, you would have been insane to suggest that the Sixers should run a highly intricate, egalitarian offense." Not knowing if he would have Joel early this season is partly what did this team in, but Nurse's inability to adjust on the fly or have a backup plan is mind boggling. It also begs the question: What if Nurse had installed a real offense last year? Maybe the non-Joel minutes wouldn't have been so disastrous yet again?
Kudos to you for watching this train wreck of a team to even have the ability to write that many words