The Ballad of Nick Nurse
So if you're not following the NBA, here's a brie recap of how our old friends the sixers are doing.
Joel Embiid is still here. Young all-star Tyrese Maxey is also here. They traded for Paul George, at one point a bona fide star in the NBA, in the offseason. They were projected to land somewhere north of 40 wins this season. In preseason betting they were ranked eighth in championship odds. Which is to say: they went into the season as a respectable playoff team. Not necessarily title contenders, but in the upper echelon of the league.
Instead as I write this they are 2-11. They are tied with Washington for the worst record in the league. Those two wins they have? Both in overtime. They have not won a game in regulation.
Injuries play a major role, of course; Joel has barely suited up for the sixers. But that's not the whole story. Their team just seems discombobulated, disorganized, slow, unfocused. Naturally, fans are asking questions about their coach, Nick Nurse.
Nurse won a championship with the Raptors, of course. Sixers fans remember that season with a wince.
So how could it be that a guy who a few years ago was an NBA champion is now suddenly such a bad coach? Was Nurse a fraud all along? Were the Sixers duped into hiring this guy?
I don't really think that's the case. I think the tale of Nick Nurse illustrates just how much context is a powerful determinant in human performance.
You see, Nurse is a genius, especially when it comes to defense. You give him the right tools and he will build you a Rube Goldberg machine to break any basketball offense. He'll snap the game in half if he has to. The 2019 playoffs were a tour de force of defensive game planning in which half the superstars in the league were successively put in jail.
But even in his later Raptor years, when Nurse had profoundly lopsided and inadequate rosters, he was still eking out an unrealistic number of wins by pushing the game's math to the breaking point. In 2021-22 he had a team that simply could not shoot, could not create decent offense. Most coaches in that situation would simply have tried to 'get their guys going', spun their wheels trying to squeeze shooting from a team that couldn't shoot. They might have tried to develop non-shooters into shooters. They might have tried to lean harder into other forms of offense.
Nurse didn't give a shit about that. Nurse simply decided to turn the ball over way less than other teams, get way more steals than other teams, and rebound way more than other teams. His team still shot the ball atrociously but they simply had so many more possessions, and thus shot attempts, to work with. That was enough to make the playoffs with a team that had no business making it that far.
But the thing is, Nurse also seems to have the emotional intelligence of a traffic cone. He's a weird little midwestern preacher man with no real rapport with anyone. Those 2019 Raptors were perfect for him: a team with a lot of continuity, that knew how to play together. A team that really just needed a new game plan. A team that had the maturity and emotional security to see past the man and imagine the vision.
Yes, he's going to make you play harsh minutes. Yes, he's going to play guys who can contribute and will relentlessly bench players who can't keep up.Yes, he's going to ask you to do things that you've not done before, and he's going to give you instructions that make little sense. But you'll win. And winning fixes everything.
The Sixers are... not that. The Sixers are a team that's broken and cursed. Their superstar has grown up in a basket case of intrigue and ego, constantly being fried by the harsh limelight of Philly sports disappointment. There's no well-oiled machine for Nurse to pull the levers on. There's no perfectly polished army of chess men. There's just people, and Nurse's no good at people.
Philly fired Doc and hired Nurse, but they don't need a physician. They need an exorcist. They needed someone who could banish the malignant spirits hanging around Wells Fargo center. Nurse just isn't that guy.