13

We the North

The Raptors are NBA champions

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Being interviewed by Doris Burke while holding my son Leo after winning Game 6 against the Warriors. (John W. McDonough / Sports Illustrated / Getty Images)

I got strangely more relaxed the longer the playoffs went on. I’m sure part of it could have been that we didn’t get knocked out early. I didn’t actively think about that possibility, but as a coach, it has to be somewhere in the back of your mind because it’s the worst of all possible outcomes.

But I also created this zone of calm around me. I didn’t watch any TV news or ESPN highlight shows because I didn’t want to hear any of the commentary on our games—not the pats on the back when we won or the critiques of why we lost. If I watched any of the other playoff series, it was with the sound turned down. I never look at social media and I obviously was not going to start then.

I spent quiet time at home with my wife and kids. I listened to music. (Our new house in Toronto has a room dedicated to that with an awesome sound system and a collection of 2,500 vinyl albums, including forty by Monk.) I went to the office earlier than usual, sometimes to be there alone watching tape, but also just to sit and play the piano.

It was a cool feeling because I knew the world around me was going crazy as we continued to advance, but as it all got noisier, I became calmer. During games, all I saw was the court, the players, and the couple of rows of fans in my view. I didn’t look up or around.

There was one moment during the tense last seconds of a game at home when the rapper Drake, a Toronto native and a devoted Raptors fan, leaned over the scorer’s table and gave me a quick back rub. If you watch it on video, it’s hilarious. But I was completely unaware of it and had to be told later that it happened.

*  *  *

My sense of well-being certainly could have been tested by how the Milwaukee series began. In the first game, we quieted their home crowd by leading basically the whole first three quarters—and fairly comfortably. And then we got thumped in the last quarter. They outscored us 32–17 and won the game, 108–100.

That could have been deflating, but for me, it was encouraging. We proved to ourselves we could beat the Bucks on the road in an Eastern Conference Final. We just didn’t finish the job.

I told the team: Okay, we just have to put a little more work in. Next game, how about if we play the whole forty-eight minutes?

But we didn’t. We were down fourteen points at the end of the first quarter, twenty-five at the end of the half, and ended up losing, 125–103.

We were a step too slow all night on just about everything. We didn’t contest shots. We gave them space, gave them confidence, and really let them settle in. We made a couple little runs but we had to play uphill the whole night.

We returned home in what most people would regard as a deep hole—down two games to none. But coaches don’t think like fans or newspaper or TV pundits. We really can’t. Our emotions don’t swing (or they shouldn’t). The cliché about not getting too high or too low really does apply. You have to move forward in some rational way.

When we regrouped in Toronto, I told the guys there was no reason to panic. Through the season and into the playoffs, we had experienced some games like our Game 2 loss to the Bucks, where we just didn’t play tough enough, our shots didn’t fall, and it all snowballed. It happened and now we just needed to move on. I said I felt confident we were going to win the series, and I meant it.

Serge followed up with a long, great speech about being down two games to none to the Spurs in a Western Conference Final in 2016, when he was playing for Oklahoma City, and then roaring back to win four straight and take the series. It was a big moment for him in the film room.

I also made a couple of tactical changes.

Their star player, and the league’s MVP, was Giannis Antetokounmpo, widely known as the Greek Freak, who at six foot eleven snares rebounds, dribbles full court, and barrels forward for layups and dunks with a power and grace that can seem unstoppable. A lot of people have this notion that you do one of two things against a player like him: guard him one-on-one and let him get his points but hold the other guys down, or send multiple defenders at him and make his teammates step up and beat you.

That was not my approach. I thought we could swarm him and make him give the ball up, and still scramble to defend their other threats. I told the team: We have to pack the paint better and not let him fly downhill at us and get all the way to the hoop. It will take multiple bodies to stop him. But when he passes, we’re going to absolutely fly at their shooters and not let them bury us with three-pointers.

Pascal had been guarding Giannis. I made a change before Game 3 and put Kawhi on him as the primary defender. Pascal guarded Khris Middleton, their secondary scorer.

Because Giannis and Middleton did lots of two-way stuff—pick-and-rolls for each other, dribble handoffs—Pascal sometimes ended up back on Giannis anyway. But after he scored twenty-four and thirty points in the first two games, we held Giannis to just twelve in Game 3.

Our defensive effort did not exactly make the game easy for us. We did win, 118–112, but it took two overtimes to get the job done.

Kawhi Leonard scored eight points in the second overtime. On the night, he played fifty-two minutes (which was never envisioned in the load management plan), including the entire fourth quarter and every minute of both overtimes.

He basically lifted us on his shoulders and saved the season. A 2–0 deficit is manageable, but no NBA team has ever climbed out of a 3–0 hole. In addition to his defense, Kawhi scored thirty-six points. When I tried to get him a short break midway through the fourth quarter, he told me, “No, I’m good.”

*  *  *

I’ve written about our player development. It never stops, not even deep into the postseason.

Freddy kept getting his shots blocked against Orlando. He was shooting from the corner—the so-called short corner and ordinarily the most desirable three-point shot to take. But defense tightens in the playoffs. He’s just six feet tall, tiny by NBA standards, and much bigger guys were swatting his shots away as he released the ball.

After Freddy had three of his shots blocked in one game, I took him aside and said, “Dude, listen, we need your three-balls. So here’s my idea. Get out of the corners. Stop shooting from there because they’re getting too close to you. So how about this? Get out there on the arc, back up five more feet from the line, and let it fly from there.”

He looked at me and said, “Okay.”

That was it.

The next thing I know, before practices and after practices—before and after game-day shootarounds—he’s out there shooting two hundred bombs at a time. He’s just pumping away and they’re going in.

We would go on to win Game 4 in Toronto against the Bucks, Game 5 back in Milwaukee, and then come home again and win Game 6. Four straight wins to close out the series. I told the team I was confident we would win the series and they went out and proved it.

It happened for lots of reasons. In Game 4, we got huge contributions from the bench, which allowed Kawhi to play a much more reasonable thirty-four minutes. Serge backed up his locker room pep talk with seventeen points and thirteen rebounds. Norman Powell had eighteen points. We were really crisp on offense, with thirty-two assists on forty-one buckets. (An assisted hoop is an indication of a team sharing the ball; an unassisted one is usually the result of a player going one-on-one.)

In Game 5, Kawhi lifted us with thirty-five points and in the clinching Game 6, he led us again with twenty-seven. We kept up and even tightened our suffocating defense on Giannis.

But probably the most astounding aspect of the last three victories was Freddy’s shooting. My suggestion proved to be pretty good and his practice paid off.

In Game 4, he hit all three of his three-point attempts. In Game 5, he shot seven of nine. In Game 6, he shot four of five. That’s fourteen for seventeen, or 82 percent—which is absurdly good shooting at any time in the season, let alone in three of the most pressure-filled games you can imagine.

*  *  *

Much of what we basketball coaches do is borrowed—or, depending on how you look at it, stolen. It’s just how things work. You can’t patent or copyright things in my business.

When I was looking for new out-of-bounds plays, a friend sent me some tapes of stuff that Rick Byrd, the longtime (and now retired) coach at Belmont University in Nashville, was running. I’m still using them. It’s clever stuff. I don’t know if Byrd was aware of it—or knew that there were like the equivalent of Belmont bootleg tapes circulating around.

I think much of what I did with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers was revolutionary, but it was built on what Chris Finch had started with the encouragement of the Rockets front office. I extended it, and what I began calling the shot spectrum is now accepted wisdom throughout the NBA.

You are twice as likely now to see a twenty-seven-foot jump shot at an NBA game than a sixteen-footer—the opposite of less than a decade ago when midrange shots were twice as common as long threes. Why? Because lots of other coaches and front offices saw that it worked. And they did the math and came to understand that it made sense.

I think the offense we run in Toronto is pretty cool, and some of it feels new. But when I coached the Canadian team at the FIBA World Cup in China over the summer, I saw numerous teams from around the world running elements of it.

If you asked me who the true visionaries have been in the years since I began my coaching career, I would name just a few: Tex Winter and Phil Jackson for the triangle; Mike D’Antoni, the current Houston coach, for all his offensive innovations with the Rockets and before that, the Suns; and Dick Bennett, the longtime and now retired coach at the University of Wisconsin, for his defensive genius.

The other visionary I’d put on the list is Steve Kerr—the coach of our opponents, the Golden State Warriors, in the NBA Finals. After winning five titles as a player with the Bulls and Spurs, he moved into the front office of the Phoenix Suns, and then in 2014, became the coach of the Warriors.

He inherited a roster that included Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green, but after he took over, they began passing the ball from angles no one had ever seen—and Curry shot it from previously unimaginable distances.

The Warriors were also a cultural phenomenon—Silicon Valley’s team, a hoops start-up that seemed to have reimagined the geometry of basketball. When Kevin Durant, one of the league’s top three players, signed with them as a free agent in 2016, it seemed almost unfair. The Warriors, in the minds of many people, were an unbeatable juggernaut. They had won three of the last four NBA titles. They were playing in their fifth consecutive NBA Finals.

I certainly didn’t have Kerr’s pedigree. In his NBA playing career, he had been teammates with Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, and Tim Duncan. (At Northern Iowa, I played alongside James Parker and Jason Reese. You’ve heard of them, right?)

No one on our Raptors roster could match the career achievements or celebrity status of the Warriors’ big four of Curry, Durant, Green, and Thompson. Kawhi, who had won an NBA title with the Spurs, came the closest.

Durant was injured, but we expected him back before the series was over. As Game 1 approached, I thought it was a good idea to directly address the high status and reputation of the team we were playing.

I did so with a couple of props that I pulled out during a film session. First, I put on a Los Angeles Rams hat. They happen to be my favorite football team, but they had just lost the 2019 Super Bowl to another legendary squad—the New England Patriots.

With my Rams hat on, I told our guys that I thought the NFC champs had gone into the Super Bowl too much in awe of the Patriots. All they seemed to talk about was how great the Pats were.

When all the hype ended and the game began, the Rams offense, which had been great all season long, was horrible. They eked out just a field goal in a 13–3 loss.

Then I put on a Philadelphia Eagles hat. I said the Eagles, in the 2018 Super Bowl, had respected New England but not so much that they didn’t think they could beat them. They said all the right things and then went out and won the damn game.

Yeah, the presentation was a bit hokey, but I thought I needed to make the point, and a little bit of humor never hurts. (I got a big reaction from Kyle when I put on the Eagles hat. A Philly guy through and through, he grew up in the city and then played college ball there at Villanova.)

The Warriors’ supposed invincibility was the elephant in the room. Before the series started, I wanted us to talk about it.

*  *  *

The series began with two games in Toronto. For the first, which took place on a Thursday night, our arena filled up early, with just about every one of the twenty thousand fans dressed in red.

Tens of thousands more gathered to watch on the big screens set up outside in what’s known as Jurassic Park. Millions of television viewers were watching in the United States, of course—but also all across Canada.

The language and cultural divide between English and French speakers in Canada is normally mirrored in its sports preferences. You will not find many (if any) hockey fans who root for both the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens. If one of those teams makes a good run in the NHL playoffs, there’s a good chance that fans of the other team are rooting against them.

One of the great things about the 2018–19 season is that we became Canada’s team. We kept picking up new fans as we rolled forward, and the excitement swept across all parts of the country and through the usual divides.

Our performance in Game 1 amped up the excitement to a new level. Any of our fans harboring doubts that we could really compete with the Warriors saw that we were up for the challenge and not intimidated.

Eight of our first nine shots were three-point attempts. I turned to someone on the bench after the first five minutes or so and said, “Have we taken a two yet?” Ordinarily, that might be too much long-range shooting, but I loved it.

I felt like the thing we had to do in the series is really go for it, and launching all of those threes—we made five in the first quarter—showed we had no hesitation. We were playing just like my old college coach, Eldon Miller, said we had to: without fear.

The confidence of our young guys was really something to behold. Fred came off the bench and played thirty-three minutes—starters’ minutes—and scored fifteen points. He had the ball in his hands a lot and turned it over just once.

Where Fred was a calming influence through much of the game, Pascal was flat-out spectacular. Just two years after he and I came together in the gym after his rookie year ended—that day he said to me, “I’ve got to learn to shoot”—he lit the NBA Finals on fire.

Pascal scored thirty-two points, a new career high, on fourteen of seventeen shooting. He actually got off to a little bit of a slow start but hit nine of ten shots in the second half, including eight straight baskets at one point (spanning the entire third quarter and most of the fourth). He filled up the rest of the box score with eight rebounds, five assists, two blocked shots, and a steal.

If you were a casual NBA fan who was just tuning in for the Finals, you probably would have thought, Who the hell is this guy?

We had the lead almost the whole game—forty-three of the forty-eight minutes—and jumped out to lead in the series with a 118–109 victory.

*  *  *

An NBA team playing the first two games on the road in a seven-game series comes in with one goal: Steal at least one game on the other team’s court. Turn the home court advantage in your favor.

After we beat the Warriors in the first game, the second one was really easy to analyze. We started out well enough, built a twelve-point lead midway through the second quarter, and went into halftime with a five-point lead. It was one of those games where Kawhi was carrying us. He kept drawing fouls and making his free throws. (He would end up sixteen for sixteen for the game.)

The Warriors have traditionally been really strong coming out of the locker room after halftime, and we weren’t ready for it. They absolutely blitzed us. In the first five and a half minutes of the second half, they scored eighteen straight points, and our 59–54 lead became a 72–59 deficit.

This game was the series’ first sighting of a box-in-one defense, which we put on Steph Curry.

Klay Thompson, Curry’s fellow “Splash Brother” (they splash a lot of jump shots), landed badly after a shot attempt early in the fourth quarter and had to leave the game a couple of minutes later.

They were still without Durant, so we turned extra attention on Curry. We played him straight-up man-to-man, with Fred on him, and everyone else played zone. I did it again later in the series, and also played a little triangle and two—similar to the ZMT defense I pulled out two decades before in Birmingham, England.

You see those defenses every now and then in college or high school but never in the NBA. Well, you know what? It’s still basketball. The players may be bigger and better, but the court is the same size, the passing angles don’t change, the hoop is still round.

Curry laughed about the gimmick defense the first time he saw it from us and said he hadn’t faced anything like it since seventh grade. “The whole fourth quarter, they were playing some janky defense,” he said.

I laughed, too. It was janky, although I had not previously heard that word applied to an NBA tactic. (The phrase “junk defense” is more common.)

In that Game 2, after we fell way behind, Danny Green hit a three-pointer to close their lead to two points with twenty-six seconds left—and we just missed getting a steal on their next possession before Andre Iguodala hit a three-pointer to give the Warriors a 109–104 victory.

They had achieved what they came for, a victory on our home court—but our janky defense may have given them a little extra to think about.

*  *  *

The next two games would be at Oracle Arena in Oakland. I went into the locker room after the game fairly calm and told the team, “All right. We knew it was going to be a long series, right? Maybe six or seven games. All we’ve got to do now is get on the plane and do what they just did—take one from them on their home court.”

As I’ve written a couple of times already, Kawhi has a habit of getting right to the heart of the matter. His game is direct. He moves from point A to point B with no wasted motion. The way he speaks is the same. No frills. No wasted words.

He stepped up when I was done and said, “Forget that.” (He may have used a different f-word than “forget.”) “We’re not going out there to win one game. We’re going to get them both.”

He quickly moved back toward the corner of the locker room, with the rest of his teammates, and I said something like, “Yep, sounds good to me. What he said.”

*  *  *

We had two days off before playing again. In one of our film sessions, I made them watch the whole eighteen-point run from the previous game. It wasn’t pretty. The Warriors just kept coming down and scoring buckets.

Through the whole playoff run, we had some constants. Kawhi was certainly one. Kyle was always steady and really tough, and in numerous games, an explosive scorer. Whether he was shooting well or not, Fred almost always gave us a good floor game.

And then we had some players who stepped up and provided what we needed at just the right time. In Game 3, Serge Ibaka was the disruptive force we needed on defense. He blocked six shots and altered several more.

On offense, we played with a lot of freedom. I had a little talk with Kyle before the game, and he told me he was going to “let it rip.” One of our players, I’m not sure who—Kyle said it was not him—wrote the same thing on the board before the game.

And that’s exactly what we did. We were more fluid, with lots of cutting and passing that produced thirty assists on our forty-three buckets. We led just about wire-to-wire and came out with a 123–109 victory.

We were halfway to the challenge Kawhi laid down: take two games at Oracle.

*  *  *

There are lots of ways to analyze basketball games and figure out the factors that go into winning and losing. We look at all the metrics—how many total passes we make in a game; where on the floor our shots, and our opponents’ shots, come from; what percentage of defensive possessions our players get their arms into the passing lanes; how often they deflect the ball.

But there are simpler things that are good indicators. For example, the game is played in four twelve-minute quarters, and if you can outscore the other team in most of those periods, you’re probably going to win the series.

In the first three games of the series, we had won ten of the twelve quarters. In Game 4, we split the first two quarters and went into halftime down four points. Then we came out of the locker room and had a Warriors-like third quarter—one of those game-defining rallies they were known for. Kawhi scored seventeen points in the quarter, of his thirty-six for the game.

Serge was a monster. He’s one of those players who builds on his own emotions, and when one element of his game falls into place, others follow. He followed his six blocked shots the previous game with twenty points.

Our 105–92 victory put us one game from being NBA champions.

*  *  *

Some of our fans may have expected that coming home to Toronto would be a coronation. Just get through the game and afterward, we’ll have a trophy ceremony. I didn’t see it that way and neither did our players.

One of the hardest things in sports is to get the fourth win to finish off a championship series. Momentum can be overrated. The other team—and especially a tough, proud champion like the Warriors—does not listen to the commentary saying that it looks like they’re going down and decide to just roll over and die. Just the opposite. They dig in and make you earn it.

I started to tell the team about a series in Iowa when we came home needing to win just one game and, probably out of overconfidence, did not get the job done. We won it on the road.

I didn’t get too far into the story before Kawhi cut me off. “You talking about the D-League?” he said. “I’m done hearing about the D-League.”

The Warriors had fought us hard at the same time they were battling terrible injury problems. But Klay Thompson was back on the court at the start of Game 5, as was Kevin Durant, for the first time in the series.

The Warriors came out hot. Before five minutes had elapsed, they’d connected on five shots from beyond the arc—two each by Thompson and Durant, and one by Curry. As I would have expected, their stars were making a statement: Not yet, Raptors.

But in the second quarter, Durant went down with another injury—later diagnosed as a torn Achilles tendon. You could see it was bad when it happened. NBA players go at one another hard, but they are a fraternity.

Their players were shaken, and so were ours. After halftime, I saw Kyle go over to their bench to ask about Durant.

We were not really clicking and played from behind almost the whole game, but we never lost contact. By late in the fourth, we had pulled even, and with a little more than three minutes remaining, Kawhi hit a jump shot to give us a 103–97 lead.

At this point, we called a time-out. Our players seemed winded. It seemed like a moment to regroup and get an extra energy push.

What followed was a little coaching nightmare—my time in the harsh glow of the bright lights. Nothing good happened after the time-out. The Warriors went on a shooting spree, with Curry and Thompson bombing in balls from deep. They put together a 9­–2 run and escaped with a 106–105 victory.

There are no counterfactuals in sports—no way to know what would have happened if we had not called that time-out. Maybe we would have powered forward and clinched it right there, on our home court. Or maybe the result would have been the same.

Some other people, though, seemed sure I had blown it. It’s a good thing I wasn’t watching TV. I now know that on one of those ESPN shows, they flashed a question on the screen, in big letters: DID NICK NURSE COST TORONTO GAME 5?

I’m sure plenty of other people were asking the same question.

*  *  *

Like in any big sporting event, there was all kinds of expert commentary preceding our matchup with the Warriors. The media members who cover the NBA closely tend to know the game and the league, so their batting average on getting things right isn’t that bad.

But I’m pretty sure nobody predicted the visiting team was going to win four of the first five games. And now we were back in Oakland, hoping to win the series and the NBA championship on the road.

To top it off, there was lots of emotion around the venue, because win or lose, Game 6 of the series was going to be the Warriors’ last in Oracle Arena, where they had played for nearly a half century. The franchise was moving into a new home across the bay in San Francisco.

You look to your veterans to step forward in games like this, especially at the start, when everyone might be a little on edge. Kyle Lowry was in his seventh season with the Raptors after beginning his career with Houston and Memphis. He was beloved in Toronto, the heartbeat of the franchise.

Less than two minutes into the game, the score was Lowry 8, Warriors 0. Kyle seemed to be sending a message that he had it handled. His first two points were on a strong drive to the hoop. The next six were on high-arching three-pointers. Both were pure as can be and hit nothing but net. (After the Warriors made a basket, Kyle hit another three-pointer, so he ended up scoring our first eleven points.)

Before long, though, we were in a dogfight. We led by one point at the end of the first quarter, three at the half, and then trailed by two at the end of the third quarter. Over the course of the game, the lead would change hands eighteen different times.

The composure of our young players was amazing. Freddy scored twelve of his twenty-two points in the game’s last nine minutes. His final basket came on a three-pointer with just under four minutes remaining that put us ahead, 104–101. It was not from the corner, where he was getting his shots blocked, but from where I had told him to move to—straightaway and deep.

The Warriors kept coming at us, but we maintained the lead through the tense final minutes by making one big play after another. Serge scored after grabbing an offensive rebound. Kyle hit a fadeaway jumper from near the foul line that touched every part of the rim before falling through.

With twenty-eight seconds left, we were clinging to a 109–108 lead when Kyle fed the ball to Pascal about twenty feet from the hoop. The shot clock was running down and he was being guarded by Draymond Green, one of the toughest defenders in the NBA. If we didn’t score, the Warriors would have the ball back needing just a two-point hoop to win.

I’m sure that Pascal’s mind did not flash back to the end-of-game situation earlier in the season, against the Suns. There’s no time for that. But everything builds. Having those opportunities, succeeding in them, prepares you for the next moment. A bigger moment.

Pascal took one dribble, followed by a big step to his left to get his shoulders past Green, and then feathered in what we call a floater—a shot off of one foot that is sort of half jump shot, half layup. I don’t know how many people understand the touch required for that kind of shot—and the steely nerves it takes to sink it in the waning seconds of such a momentous game.

Steph Curry made a couple of foul shots to bring the Warriors within one—but then missed a three-pointer that would have put them ahead. Kawhi made three foul shots in the final seconds to give us a 114–110 victory.

We were the NBA champions.

The first one of the NBA’s seventy-three champions, going back to the league’s founding in 1946, to be based outside the United States.

And the first to be coached by a hoops vagabond from Carroll, Iowa, who fought his way up from a bunch of teams no one ever heard of in England—who came up through the D-League—and somehow reached the pinnacle of the basketball world.

*  *  *