TORONTO – Nick Nurse was in Las Vegas for NBA Summer League last July when he learned the news: Kawhi Leonard, the player most responsible for leading his Raptors team to a championship a month prior, had agreed to sign with the Los Angeles Clippers.
It could have been a time of great distress – and probably would’ve been for almost anybody else in that position – but Toronto’s head coach barely flinched. Instead of wasting energy lamenting what he and his club just lost, he started to think about what they still had, and what he could do with it.
It turned out to be a defining moment for the franchise, which hasn’t missed a beat in the post-Leonard era – finishing the 2019-20 season with the league’s second-best record and the highest win percentage in team history. But for Nurse, it was just another puzzle to solve, another obstacle to conquer.
“It’s kinda like the way I approach a lot of things,” Nurse said on Saturday afternoon, a few hours after learning he had won NBA Coach of the Year.
“It’s not unlike the playoffs – you get in these games, you think the series are going to go long, sometimes you’ve gotta take some of the eventualities of what happened and be able to keep moving. So, that’s it. I think we knew it was a possibility [that Leonard would leave], thought we had a great chance for him to come back considering how the season went, but it wasn’t meant to be. And again, you can’t blame anybody for wanting to go home. But we still have a job to do, and we looked at it as opportunities for the other guys.”
Fresh off a remarkable campaign in which his team overcame the loss of two championship starters – including the Finals MVP – and a barrage of injuries to key players, there was little doubt that Nurse would be named Coach of the Year. Still, he was not expecting the announcement to come when it did, and on live national television.
He had been asked to appear on TNT’s studio show ahead of the afternoon game between Milwaukee and Orlando. He wondered what the popular and award-winning panel of Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal were going to ask him, but didn’t give it too much thought. He’s got other things on his mind – the Raptors can sweep Brooklyn and advance to the second round with a win on Sunday.
Once they started playing a recorded message from his high school basketball coach, Wayne Chandlee, he figured something was up. When Chandlee, who coached him as a ninth grader at Kuemper Catholic School in Iowa, congratulated him on winning Coach of the Year, it nearly brought him to tears.
Fittingly, Kyle Lowry and Fred VanVleet – the first two players that Nurse spoke to after Leonard made his decision last summer – delivered him the trophy. A landslide winner of the award, Nurse received 90 of 100 first-place votes from a global panel of sportswriters and broadcasters.
“It’s been an interesting journey, that’s for sure,” said the Raptors’ second-year head coach. “It’s a humbling award, it really is.”
Nurse had coached all over the world before Dwane Casey and the Raptors hired him as an assistant in 2013. From the British League to Division I basketball, from Belgium to the NBA Development League – he’s won championships and coaching awards at almost every stop.
When Nurse was in his second stint in England, he admits that he considered packing his bags, going home and giving up on coaching for good. He was in his mid-20s at the time, his team was hovering around .500, and he remembers going back to his hotel room and making a list of four things he thought he might want to do instead. It included real estate, accounting, and running a recreation centre.
“They all looked like absolute s— to me, so I figured I better get working on coaching and figure it out,” he joked.
Years later, after Casey was let go and Nurse was interviewing for the Raptors’ job, one of the things that stood out to Masai Ujiri, Bobby Webster & Co. was his ability and willingness to improvise and adapt on the fly. Throughout his career, he’s always had to be flexible and go with the flow.
To him, replacing Leonard’s elite production without adding a player at or even close to his calibre didn’t seem all that different from chasing a D-League title with the Iowa Energy and finding out that his star player got called up to the NBA an hour before a big game.
“When you see Nick on the sidelines, that’s who he is as a person – relaxed but so hard working, creative and dynamic, always setting the tone for our team [by] attacking our next championship, rather than defending our last,” Ujiri said in a press release. “That is who Nick is, that is why we believe in him. His journey to this tremendous honour has been a long one – we are so happy to see him recognized this way.”
It’s not a coincidence that this Raptors team has adopted so many of those qualities. They play hard every night but there’s a calmness and quiet confidence to them. They always seem to find a way to figure things out – whether they’re undermanned going into a game, or battling back from a double-figure deficit. Just like their head coach, they never seem overwhelmed. They never panic.
Nurse is laid back – a man that doesn’t seem to let the pressure of a stressful profession get him down. He’s almost always smiling and upbeat. He has a passion for music that rivals his love of basketball. He’ll make references to his time in the D-League and play his favourite Earth, Wind & Fire tracks during practice, yet he’s still able to relate to each of his players.
He also doesn’t beat around the bush. He’s a strong communicator, who is straightforward with his team – and with the media – and tells it as it is. He knows which buttons to push and how to get the most out of his players, which is why so many of them have had career seasons under his watch. In addition to his approach, they can probably identify with his story. Like Nurse, many of the Raptors’ players have had to scrap and claw to get their big break in the NBA.
“I think it’s part of the makeup of a lot of our guys,” Nurse said. That’s hard to manufacture, it’s hard to teach, it’s kind of something that’s in your gut, in your heart, or it isn’t, and we’ve got a group of guys that are like that. Now some of it is contagious and it spreads and I think it becomes part of who we are up and down the roster.”
Nurse has a collaborative coaching style. He takes feedback from his players and tight-knit staff. He’s always thinking outside of the box, looking for innovative ways to defend and to score. There’s nothing, no matter how outrageous it may seem, that he’s unwilling to try on the court. If it can help win games, it’s very much on the table.
“I think that my training gave me a chance to try a lot of different things,” said the 53-year-old. “I guess when I finally did make it to the NBA as an assistant and kinda saw some things, I thought if I ever got a chance to become a head coach, a lot of the things that I tried in some of those back-water places I thought maybe would still work. And that’s probably just the basis for that. But I would say this, too: Masai and Bobby as the leadership of the organization encourage a lot of [that]. They wanted me to go out on a limb or do things different or try to shake things up once in a while, so that also helps you to be able to go ahead and do that.”
The resume speaks for itself. In his first two seasons at the helm, Nurse has led the Raptors to a championship and he’s got them in position to compete for another. But it’s not just what they’ve accomplished that speaks to Nurse’s impact, it’s how they’ve accomplished it. This Toronto team embodies the personality of the man in charge, and that’s the mark of a great coach.
“There’s a player development segment, there’s a way we play defence, there’s a way we share the ball, there’s competitiveness, there’s a never-give-up attitude,” Nurse said. “There’s lots of things that have emerged from this team, but I think that the biggest one is the way we try to go out and play hard and try hard defensively, and how we try to figure things out almost each and every possession, on each and every night. We don’t do it every night, but we come out fighting most nights and that’s the trait that I think I would say we should all be proud of, anybody that likes the Raptors.”
CALGARY – The Calgary Flames have re-signed defenceman Ilya Solovyov and centre Cole Schwindt, the NHL club announced Wednesday.
Solovyov signed a two-year deal which is a two-way contract in year one and a one-way deal in year two and carries an average annual value of US$775,000 at the NHL level.
Schwindt signed a one-year, two-way contract with an average annual value of $800,000 at the NHL level.
The 24-year-old Solovyov, from Mogilev, Belarus, made his NHL debut last season and had three assists in 10 games for the Flames. He also had five goals and 10 assists in 51 games with the American Hockey League’s Calgary Wranglers and added one goal in six Calder Cup playoff games.
Schwindt, from Kitchener, Ont., made his Flames debut last season and appeared in four games with the club.
The 23-year-old also had 14 goals and 22 assists in 66 regular-season games with the Wranglers and added a team-leading four goals, including one game-winning goal, in the playoffs.
Schwindt was selected by Florida in the third round, 81st overall, at the 2019 NHL draft. He came to Calgary in July 2022 along with forward Jonathan Huberdeau and defenceman MacKenzie Weegar in the trade that sent star forward Matthew Tkachuk to the Panthers.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2024.
KING CITY, Ont. – Oman scored 10 runs in the final over to edge Nepal by one wicket with just one ball remaining in ICC Cricket World Cup League 2 play Wednesday.
Kaleemullah, the No. 11 batsman who goes by one name, hit a four with the penultimate ball as Oman finished at 223 for nine. Nepal had scored 220 for nine in its 50 overs.
Kaleemullah and No. 9 batsman Shakeel Ahmed each scored five in the final over off Sompal Kami. They finished with six and 17 runs, respectively.
Opener Latinder Singh led Oman with 41 runs.
Nepal’s Gulsan Jha was named man of the match after scoring 53 runs and recording a career-best five-wicket haul. The 18-year-old slammed five sixes and three-fours in his 35-ball knock, scoring 23 runs in the 46th over alone when he hit six, six, four, two, four and one off Aqib Ilyas.
Captain Rohit Paudel led Nepal with 60 runs.
The 19th-ranked Canadians, who opened the triangular series Monday with a 103-run win over No. 17 Nepal, face No. 16 Oman on Friday, Nepal on Sunday and Oman again on Sept. 26. All the games are at the Maple Leaf Cricket Ground.
The eight World League 2 teams each play 36 one-day internationals spread across nine triangular series through December 2026. The top four sides will go through to a World Cup qualifier that will decide the last four berths in the expanded 14-team Cricket World Cup in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia.
Canada (5-4) stands second in the World League 2 table. The 14th-ranked Dutch top the table at 6-2.
Oman (2-2 with one no-result) stands sixth, ahead of Nepal (1-5).
Canada won all four matches in its opening tri-series in February-March, sweeping No. 11 Scotland and the 20th-ranked host Emirates. But the Canadians lost four in a row to the 18th-ranked U.S. and host Netherlands in August.
Canada which debuted in the T20 World Cup this summer in the U.S. and West Indies, is looking to get back to the showcase 50-over Cricket World Cup for the first time since 2011 after failing to qualify for the last three editions. The Canadian men also played in the 1979, 2003 and 2007 tournaments, exiting after the group stage in all four tournament appearances.
The Canadian men regained their one-day international status for the first time in almost a decade by finishing in the top four of the ICC Cricket World Cup Qualifier Playoff in April 2023 in Bermuda.
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This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2024
PENTICTON, B.C. – Rick Tocchet has already warned his Vancouver Canucks players — the looming NHL season won’t be easy.
The team made strides last year, the head coach said Wednesday ahead of training camp. The bar has been raised for this year’s campaign.
“To get to the next plateau, there are higher expectations and it’s going to be hard. We know that,” Tocchet said in Penticton, B.C., where the team will open its camp on Thursday.
“So that’s the next level. It starts day one (on Thursday). My thing is don’t waste a rep out there.”
The Canucks finished atop the Pacific Division with a 50-23-9 record last season, then ousted the Nashville Predators from the playoffs in a gritty, six-game first-round series. Vancouver then fell to the Edmonton Oilers in a seven-game second-round set.
Last fall, Jim Rutherford, the Canucks president of hockey operations, said everything would have to go right for the team to make a playoff push. That doesn’t change this season, he said, despite last year’s success.
“The challenges will be greater, certainly. But I believe the team that we started with last year, we have just as good a team to start the season this year and probably better,” he said.
“As long as the team builds off what they did last year, stick to what the coaches tell them, stick to the system, stick together in good times and bad times, this team has a chance to do pretty well.”
Some key players will be missing as Vancouver’s training camp begins, however.
Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin announced Wednesday that star goalie Thatcher Demko will not be on the ice when the team begins it’s pre-season preparation.
Allvin did not disclose the reason for Demko’s absence, but said the 28-year-old American has been making progress.
“He’s been in working extremely hard and he seems to be in a great mindset,” the GM said.
Demko missed several weeks of the regular season and much of Vancouver’s playoff run last spring with a knee injury.
The six-foot-four, 192-pound goalie has a career 213-116-81 regular-season record with a .912 save percentage, a 2.79 goals-against average and eight shutouts across seven seasons with the Canucks.
Allvin also announced that veteran centre Teddy Blueger and defensive prospect Cole McWard will also miss the start of training camp after each had “minor lower-body surgery.”
Vancouver previously announced winger Dakota Joshua won’t be present for the start of camp as he recovers from surgery for testicular cancer.
Tocchet said he’ll have no problem filling the holes, and plans to switch his lines up a lot in Penticton.
“Nothing’s set in stone,” he said. “I think it’s important that you have different puzzles at different times.”
The coach added that he expects standout centre Elias Pettersson to begin on a line with Canucks newcomer Jake DeBrusk.
Vancouver inked DeBrusk, a former Boston Bruins forward, to a seven-year, US$38.5 million deal when the NHL’s free agent market opened on July 1.
The glare on Pettersson is expected to be bright once again as he enters the first year of a new eight-year, $92.8 million contract. The 25-year-old Swede struggled at times last season and put 89 points (34 goals, 55 assists) in 82 games.
Rutherford said he was impressed with how Pettersson looked when he returned to Vancouver ahead of camp.
“He seems to be a guy that’s more relaxed and more comfortable. And for obvious reasons,” said the president of hockey ops. “This is a guy that I believe has worked really hard this summer. He’s done everything he can to play as a top-line player. … The expectation for him is to be one of the top players on our team.”
A number of Canucks hit milestones last season, including Quinn Hughes, who led all NHL defencemen in scoring with 92 points and won the Norris Trophy as the league’s top blue liner.
Several players could once again have career-best years for Vancouver, Tocchet said, but they’ll need to be consistent and not allow frustration to creep in when things go wrong.
“You’ve just got to drive yourself every day when you have a great year,” the coach said. “You’ve got to keep creating that environment where they can achieve those goals, whatever they are. And the main goal is winning. That’s really what it comes down to.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2024.
