One small cautionary note about Nurse: Barnes has not developed well. FVV hasn't developed well. Is he really good at development just because he started his career that way? I don't know if we have any evidence of that, but perhaps he can get a better coaching staff here.
How has FVV not developed well? He has went from an undrafted player to an All Star while at Toronto. I can't imagine a better player development story than that. I think maybe your standards are super unrealistic if that doesn't count for you.
Aren’t assistants largely responsible for individual player development… HC for big picture things, game plan/management, rotations, etc.
Pure speculation, but possibly Nick is also feeling a bit of the old Bill Parcells, "They want you to cook the dinner; at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries?" Toronto probably has one of the most ironclad and stable front offices in the league with Masai Ujiri making upwards of $15M per year, and Bobby Webster who in my eyes should be considered one of the absolute top executive candidates for any opening going forward considering how he's crushed it pretty much across the board and yet gets zero credit because of Masai's tremendously long shadow. I would think that out of the entire NBA, the Rockets have the biggest power vacuum in the front office, with Rafael Stone likely to have a nuclear hot seat when they miss out on Wemby, lose 50+ games next year, and give OKC a top 10 draft pick. Meanwhile, Nurse would be on a long term deal, and the Rockets will have likely given up a first rounder to Toronto for the right to sign him. I could easily see Nurse having an outsized role in personnel decisions in such a scenario. Do I think this is good idea to have a coach/GM? Absolutely not; the game has advanced far too much, and it's far too much work for any one person to succeed at both unless you literally have an inner-circle hall-of-famer like Tim Duncan. But I like Nurse a lot as a coach, and I think he's the best of a bunch of non-appealing realistic options this summer, especially if he keeps Abdelfattah the same way Dwayne Casey gave him a shot as a lead assistant many years ago.
I think this premise is flawed and overly cynical. This roster, as-is, with a good coach and like one good ass-kicking defense-minded veteran added to the roster, plus natural development from the current players, avoids losing 50 games next season IMO. There are also other high-floor, NBA-ready, immediate impact rookies we could end up with besides Wemby (Walker, and although I'm not a big fan, Miller). And that's a bad outcome. You start talking actually getting Wemby, Harden comes on over, or we sign two or three good roleplayers instead of just one, we pull off a pupu platter for somebody useful trade, stuff like that--and this is a .500ish team competing to make the play-in.
I think if Raptors wanted to keep Nurse they would have offered him something already. There's a lot of complaints within the fan base bout Nurse, he's running the starters to the ground while ending up in 9th seed. I hope the relationship is over and we can grab him
I thought the coach was setting "the plan" more or less and the assistance are doing more of the one on one development coaching to the plan. I imagine a coach says, Yeah, I similarly took that view. I'm not even sure if it's necessarily anything against Nurse - the team is stagnant at this point - they need to shake it up. They won the title, Kawhi left, and they haven't added necessarily anything significant to the team but have managed to stay competitive just growing their young talent(aside from the Injury year that landed them Barnes in the draft)...but their top end talent are a handful of Robin's missing their Batman and most of their best players have been hurt and/or perpetually on the verge of being traded. We have probably reached the limit of what Nurse can do with that team after 4 years of more or less the same big roster pieces. They really should have just pulled a trade after the last few years of stagnation but alas....a coaching change is going to have to do...plus we know Udoka is buddies with Toronto's GM and is a fine coach as well.
Toronto was the least offensive place outside of Houston for The Dream to finish his career imo. Didn’t he spend time there in the summers already? If he had gone to a team like the Lakers, Mavs, or (God forbid) the Jazz … the people would have marched on The Summit and demanded Les’ head
I would imagine that a head coach with player development as his background would have players developing relatively well. Could be the players themselves, just speculating.