Rapture by Nick Nurse with Michael Sokolove Foreword by Phil Jackson

Author:Nick Nurse with Michael Sokolove Foreword by Phil Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

In September 2013, my first season as an NBA assistant, the Raptors gathered for preseason training camp in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At our second practice, I was running an offensive drill and two different guys tossed me a ball. I didn’t see the one coming and it smashed my glasses. I just chucked them to the side and kept on rolling. I could still see, though not perfectly.

It was purely an accident, but the players were laughing about it and I didn’t want to allow it to become a big joke by stopping the drill and trying to repair them or by putting back on a pair of busted glasses. That may seem humorless on my part, but the thing you have to understand is that a new coach in the NBA is on trial.

If you’ve played sports at a lower level, you may remember that a lot of your energy went into trying to impress your coach. If you wanted to play, you had to make him love you. That gets inverted in the NBA. A new coach—especially an assistant up from the D-League with zero playing pedigree—has to impress the players. He has to sell himself.

What are you bringing that can improve the team? Uplift their individual games? Better their position in the marketplace?

If you try to tell them about the championships you won with the Iowa Energy or Rio Grande Valley Vipers (or, God forbid, the titles in England), you’re making a big mistake. A couple of guys on the roster might be able to relate, but it won’t mean a thing to the team’s top players and they’ll just laugh at you.

(One quick aside about the glasses: I went to an eye doctor the next day in Halifax and got new ones. That off-season, I got LASIK surgery, so I don’t need them anymore. The season came around and after the first game, I saw that I’d received several calls from my mom.

When I reached back out to her, she said, “How come you weren’t on the bench tonight?” I told her I got that surgery and I was there, but without glasses. She said to me, “You put those glasses back on. I can’t find you on TV.”

So I did. I put on glasses with clear lenses. My mom passed away in 2019, while we were on a West Coast road trip, at ninety-four, but I’m still wearing them.)

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