5

An Iowa Homecoming

How to get the (bleep) back up

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Draft night with the Iowa Energy. (Nurse family collection)

There’s a character in Hamilton named Hercules Mulligan who was a spy for the Continental Army, operating behind British lines. The show has very little profanity in it. But in one memorable lyric, in the song “Yorktown,” Hercules proclaims: “When you knock me down, I get the fuck back up again.”

That is not the worst motto for going forward in life. When I came home to Iowa in 2006, I had zero money. Literally zip. After a dozen years overseas, I had nine championships to my name, but nothing else.

A part of me sees this period of my life as such a downward spiral. I’ve never shared much of it because it feels embarrassing. But one of my big reasons for doing this book is a feeling that I may have some inspiration to put out into the world—some lessons on how to get back up after you’ve been knocked on your ass. That’s a big part of sports. A big part of trying to achieve any kind of success or happiness.

Just a dozen years after leaving Brighton, I became head coach of an NBA team. Even now, that seems a little unlikely. There was some luck and good timing involved. But much more so, there was an intensity of work and self-belief on my part.

*  *  *

I moved in with my sister and her family in Des Moines when I returned and was working as a fitness trainer and private basketball coach. One afternoon I was driving on I-235, which goes right through the heart of Des Moines, and I passed by the new Wells Fargo Arena. It was about a year old and hard to miss since part of it hangs over the highway. I knew the area because it was right next to Veterans Memorial Auditorium, where my high school team won the state title.

I pulled off at an exit, got the number for the arena, and called in and asked for the general manager. I wasn’t famous at that point (nor am I really now) but I was maybe a little bit Iowa famous. The guy on the other end of the phone thought he recognized my name. “Aren’t you the guy who played at Northern Iowa?” he asked me.

That established that I was not just some random nut calling in from the side of the road. I told him a little bit about what I had been up to in recent years and then said, “This is a beautiful-looking arena. You guys really ought to have a D-League team in here.”

He agreed. “We’d love that,” he said, which was all I needed to set off on a quest.

I did a ton of research on the size of the markets of the D-League teams at the time. Many of them were a whole lot smaller than Des Moines, which has more than two hundred thousand residents and is almost twice as big as any other city in the state. The D-League was playing in places like Erie, Pennsylvania; Canton, Ohio; and Portland, Maine—way smaller cities than Des Moines.

I made contact with people at the NBA offices in New York and then with D-League executives in Charlotte. I put together numbers on the size of the Des Moines market and the projected fan base and revenue and possible sponsors.

I had, of course, been involved in all of this stuff in Brighton. I knew the language. But now I was in a city and a state that I knew, from my own experience, absolutely loved basketball. If we did it right, they would embrace it.

I wasn’t looking to own a team. God no, not after what I’d just been through. I wanted to get someone else interested in that. But in my mind, I was going to coach a team if we could get one. I had not succeeded in breaking into the pro ranks in the US in any other way, so why not create a damn team I could coach?

Iowa is crazy for minor-league baseball. There are teams in Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Quad Cities, Burlington, Clinton, Sioux City, Waterloo, and Clarinda.

Various minor-league basketball teams over the years had failed. None of them, though, were in anything as organized or as well funded as the D-League, which had direct NBA backing (like baseball’s minor leagues are backed by big-league clubs)—and none played in an arena like the new Wells Fargo.

I made my way to the man in town everyone said I had to talk to—Jerry Crawford, a big lawyer and a political and civic activist. He dabbled in various sports, including owning some racehorses.

The first time we talked was on the phone. As I got partway into my pitch, he stopped me, and I’ll never forget what he said. His exact quote was: “Not another fucking minor-league basketball team, right?”

*  *  *

Over time, I wore Jerry down. He brought in other partners and they set about trying to get a team. On February 7, 2007, the D-League named four new franchises and one of them was Des Moines. I was named the coach of this team, just as I had hoped.

I got involved in all the organizational stuff, including what the team was going to be called. We had a contest and a lot of names were suggested, most of them not good. The Corncobs and the Scarecrows were two that surfaced. We settled on the Iowa Energy. (As an affiliate of the Minnesota Timberwolves, in the G League, they are now called the Iowa Wolves.)

We were not going to have our first game for about another nine months and I needed something to do and an income. One day I went to this huge AAU tournament. In the decade I had been gone, I heard a lot about AAU ball, and I wanted to see what it was all about.

The tournament was in the town of Ankeny, a Des Moines suburb. As soon as I walked in, I could see how the youth basketball scene had blown up. The bleachers were packed with parents—there were dozens of teams all around—and there were people in the hallways. You could hardly move.

When I started watching the games, the other thing I noticed was that the quality of play was bad, especially the shooting. The ball did not go in the hoop at any reasonable kind of percentage because nobody shot it with proper form—meaning footwork, angle of the wrist and elbow, backspin on the ball.

Shooting had been my thing for as long as I’d been involved in basketball and it was always going to be a way for me to make a few bucks if all else failed. I decided I would run shooting camps.

I went back to my place and wrote out a letter. It said, basically: My name’s Nick Nurse. I come from a small Iowa town and I played Division I basketball, and the only reason I could play is because I could shoot the ball. I went to Europe for ten years to coach and now I’d like to teach your kid to become a better shooter.

There’s a fine line between entrepreneurial and desperate. I’m not sure which side I was on. I started going to more tournaments and handing the letter out to people in the stands. I put it on car windshields in the parking lots.

I had gone to a seminar on internet marketing, which was a newer thing at the time. I pumped out material every day and figured out where to target it. I pretty quickly built up a nice little business and was running shooting camps all over the area. I taught the fundamentals that many players, even really good ones, either ignore or never knew.

I have never not been a shooting coach. In Toronto, I teach my players how to do it—and my assistant coaches how to teach it. Few things irritate me more than when I see a coach just rebounding the ball and throwing it back to players without looking closely at form and correcting it. I sometimes say: if we just wanted a rebounder, I could hire a high school kid.1

Since we’re on the subject—and for those of you who would like to go out to the driveway or gym to put these into practice—here, briefly, are the basics of what I taught to the kids who signed up for my camp, and what I teach to this day in the NBA.

*  *  *

There was one other important aspect of my instruction: I designed a basketball that served as a teaching aid. It was red, white, and blue, and we put a stripe down the middle, with painter’s tape, so a shooter would know exactly where to grip it. At my camps, we had lines on the floor pointing toward the hoops, and shooters could use those lines and the marking on the center of the ball as they set up to shoot. It amounted to quick visual teaching on how to release the ball straight with backspin.

I ordered really good balls, in bulk, from a company in New York and had them doctored up at a family reunion. We basically had an assembly line going.

You may have heard a basketball referred to as “the pill” if you’ve ever played pickup on the playground. If you take a shot instead of passing to an open teammate, you’re likely to hear someone yell, “Pass the damn pill!”

I named my special basketball in honor of this playground slang. It was called the Nurse’s Pill. We had a company mass-produce them (no more painter’s tape).

The basketball has lettering that says, THE NURSE’S PILL, and under that is the slogan: “Your Prescription to Better Shooting.” I have to say, it’s a sharp-looking item. (And still available on eBay and in other corners of the internet!)

*  *  *

The Iowa Energy played its first game on November 23, 2007. We defeated the Dakota Wizards, the league’s defending champion.

Three nights later we took the floor at the Wells Fargo for the first time and it was a sensational evening. We came out in our eye-catching uniforms—purple, orange, and red—and won again, defeating the Albuquerque Thunderbirds. The attendance of 8,842 set a new D-League record.

The victories were by a combined five points, the beginning of a season-long pattern: the games in the D-League tended to be really close, and we didn’t win enough of them. We would finish the season with a record of 22-28, missing the playoffs.

The “D” in the D-League stood, of course, for “developmental,” meaning, primarily, the development of players—but every coach wants to win. It is part of our competitive nature. And just like the players, we were in a developmental phase, fighting for our careers. I needed to keep the job I had (I was not going back to England a third time) and put myself in a position to get a better one.

One big challenge of the D-League is that players come and go quickly. You lose your best guys when they get called up to the NBA, replace them, and then quite often they end up back with you after they’re cut loose. The back end of your roster is constantly in flux because you’re trying guys out.

When our first season ended, I sat down with my staff and said: How can we design offensive and defensive systems, as well as terminology, that can be learned really quickly? How can we refine our system to what they can handle?

I don’t want my teams to necessarily play with less complexity than our opponents. The system has to have some variance to it—a range of ways to attack and defend. But what I wanted to do after that first season in Iowa was figure out how to teach the way we play with less complexity.

We spent a good bit of time just thinking up what we were going to call our different offensive plays and defensive coverages—numbers or colors or other words that players could easily remember. We established the principles we would hammer into players. On defense, for example, the principles were pressure the ball, contest shots, and block out on rebounds. Every single thing we did was built out from that foundation and it enabled players to more easily grasp the finer details.

What I learned in the NBA is that this kind of teaching—concise, easily understood, putting bedrock principles before the granular detail—is no less important. And for many of the same reasons as in the D-League—including the fact that you can come in to work one day and be looking at several new faces.

The NBA trade deadline comes after we’ve played about two-thirds of the schedule, just as we are entering the home stretch leading into the playoffs. A crazy number of players change teams at the deadline, sometimes more than 10 percent of the league, and it’s not unusual for teams—even good ones contending for the NBA title—to end up with new players in the starting lineup. No other pro sport experiences such roster chaos so late in the season.

And keep in mind that on a basketball team, switching out just one starter constitutes a 20 percent change in the starting lineup. Between starters and subs, most teams play an eight- or nine-man rotation, so switching out two or three of them, which isn’t uncommon, amounts to massive change.

The D-League was great preparation for the NBA’s roster upheavals because down there it happened all the time. You had a group of guys—they came together, developed roles—and then they’d all leave, and you had to do it again.

And this would happen like ten times. One day you had team chemistry and the next you were coaching a group of strangers.

*  *  *

I’ve written about an intensity of effort, and by that, I mean an utter and complete devotion to getting better at your chosen field. It’s only basketball in my case. I believe it has value—the product we put on the floor entertains people, and sometimes serves as a needed diversion in difficult times—but I know its relative importance. There’s a long list of people doing more vital work—doctors, nurses, teachers, scientists, mail carriers, social workers, farmers. Hell, carpenters and plumbers, too.

But the lessons that can be drawn from how I have approached my work and career are universal: you get out of it what you put in.

In the D-League, any night we weren’t playing, I watched NBA games on TV with a whiteboard on my lap. During time-outs, I would draw a play for the team with the ball. What would get them a basket? Would my play match what the NBA coach drew up?

I did the same thing when I was in England, viewing the games on those VHS tapes that got routed through Germany. The plays had already been run, days before, but it didn’t matter. I was rehearsing for when I got my shot.

I’m sure that seems a little crazy or obsessive but it helped me. I tell young coaches they ought to do the same thing—don’t just watch a game from your couch; put yourself in the mind of the head coach. I don’t know how many take me up on it.

In an NBA game, you’ve got about twenty seconds to draw up a play at a time-out and then you have to communicate it to your team. The music in the arena is blasting at like a zillion decibels. It’s not that easy. If you see a team come out of a stoppage in play and look like they didn’t all run the same play, or they don’t run a play that looked like something a coach would have wanted, there’s a reason for it: it probably did not get drawn up or communicated effectively enough for everyone to be on the same page.

*  *  *

If you could have looked in on me the summer after my first season in Iowa, it might have been a little alarming. I lived in a pretty nice place adjoining a golf course, but I didn’t play very often and I’m not sure how much I even got outside. Probably mostly just for meals.

I was pissed that we didn’t do better, and what hit me really hard was how close the games were. It seemed like every one that we lost came down to the last couple of possessions. If I designed better plays at the end, if we did a better job executing them, or if our players understood better what I wanted, we easily could have turned half a dozen games around and made the playoffs.

As a coach, when you don’t win, you can complain about your players’ efforts. You can whine that you weren’t provided better players. Or, you can look inward and examine what you could have done to put them in better positions to succeed.

My assistant coach was Nate Bjorkgren, whom I later hired for my staff in Toronto. He played for me at South Dakota and then became a high school coach. He was as hungry as I was.

In Iowa that first season, he worked as a volunteer before we were able to give him a paid position the next year. He often paid for his own flights to away games, or if a game was within a couple hundred miles, he drove. I’d pay for his meals.

Nate and I spent the months after the season in my basement, holed up like survivalists. I put up dry-erase boards on every wall. Day in and day out, we plotted how we could improve offensively, how we could get better defensively, what we could do differently in terms of player personnel. Once we came up with something, it would go on a spreadsheet, so we would be running back and forth between the whiteboards and the computer.

That first year had been like a testing ground. The day it ended, we went after it, all summer long, to get ready for the second year. It had taken me a long time to break in to coaching at the professional level in the US, and I didn’t want it to end abruptly.

Because of all the close games we lost, we spent a lot of those hours imagining every possible end-of-game scenario we could think of and drawing up schemes to win games.

We would be like, “Okay, we’re down two points, six seconds to go, and inbounding underneath the other team’s basket. Let’s draw up a play. Now let’s do it from half-court. Still six seconds left, but we’re down three so we need a three-point shot.”

We’d keep changing it up: “We’re under the hoop and the score is tied, but now we only have a second and a half. We’re on the left sideline. Now, the right.”

We’d have notations all over the board. Put our offensive subs in ASAP. Do we have a time-out left? Can we run the baseline? Is the other team over the foul limit? Are we?

Every one of these answers led to a different scenario, a different play call. We’d draw something up and I’d say, “This ain’t right, Nate,” and we’d erase it and go with something else.

Then we would reverse it—the other team had the ball and we’re on defense. Pick them up full court? Guard the inbounds pass or double-team their best ball handler to keep it out of his hands? If we’re up three points, do we foul them and put them on the line? With how many seconds left? Do you do one thing on the road and another at home?

People would say, how can you spend all that time in there? How many variables are there? Well, the variables are infinite. As many as you want to run.

At the end of the summer, every single whiteboard, all around the basement, was filled. They had been filled multiple times. We took pictures and then erased the boards to make more room.

I came up with a philosophy that would guide us going forward: every time we practice, we’re going to put up on the scoreboard that the score is tied, 90–90, and there are three minutes left. Or sometimes we’ll make it just one minute left.

I do the same thing now with the Raptors. Tons of end-of-game situations at practices. It focuses the mind. There are no harmless turnovers when you practice like that, no casually missed shots. It all counts.

After we focused our practices in Iowa on how we would win at the end of games—after that summer Nate and I spent in the basement—we turned it around. Over the next three seasons, our record was a combined 102-48.

It was a big learning point for me. I know that the D-League back then, and the G League now, is off the radar for most fans. But these were the highest-quality players I had ever coached, and after a year of not exactly figuring it out, I felt like I had learned how to make them win.

We won the D-League championship in 2011. There was another little victory wrapped up in that championship: in one of the playoff games at Wells Fargo Arena, we drew 14,036 fans—another record for the D-League and confirmation that Des Moines, despite predictions to the contrary, was ready for “another fucking minor league basketball team.”

*  *  *

I was tested by the difficult road I took as well as enriched by it.

Even the most junior assistant at a high Division I program in NCAA basketball makes a good salary. He flies charter and stays at good hotels. The same is true for young NBA assistants, except that the hotels are better—instead of the Marriott, they stay at the Ritz or Four Seasons.

I didn’t have any of that for a long time. Not in England or the D-League. It gave me a certain mindset. It made me recognize a kind of hunger in some players, and how, as a coach, I could tap into that.

I’ve told the story of Nate and me to young coaches. It’s funny. It’s entertaining. Everybody gets a kick out of it. Two guys in a basement, pizza boxes strewn all over, imagining game scenarios while scribbling all over whiteboards.

It’s the hoops version of that movie A Beautiful Mind. But instead of brilliant mathematical equations, we’re drawing up sideline out-of-bounds plays.

But here’s the thing. When I talk about how we made a spreadsheet of all the stuff we put on the dry-erase boards, I get asked by young coaches: Can we have that? They want the work product without doing the work.

And I say, no, you’re missing the whole damn point. You have to do it yourself.

*  *  *

Footnotes

1 In our championship season, the Raptors were fourth in the league in “true shooting percentage,” which is a combination of two-point shots, three-pointers, and free throws. Our rankings, as we both taught better shooting form and strategized ways to get better shots, had been steadily rising year to year.