Nick Nurse is Making the Sixers Less Predictable
Daniel Olinger is a writer for the Rights To Ricky Sanchez, and author of “The Danny” column, even though he refuses to be called that in person. He still has to shoot 50 free throws to save his job, and can be followed on X @dan_olinger.
“The Danny” is brought to you by the Official Realtor Of The Process, Adam Ksebe.
I didn’t want Nick Nurse.
Sure, I wasn’t exactly mourning the dismissal of Doc Rivers following his third consecutive second round playoff exit, but Nurse wasn’t my preferred replacement. Toronto’s offense was an absolute slog during his final three seasons there, and multiple playoff series pitted against him and (more importantly) the Raptors’ extremely online fanbase had turned me off to Nurse.
Daryl Morey’s coaching choice can’t be properly graded until we see how the team performs in the postseason, but two months into the Nurse era, it feels like an A+.
The Sixers have the second-best net rating in the entire NBA, per Cleaning The Glass — trailing only the Boston Celtics, who recently surpassed them during the team’s Embiid-less road-trip. Joel Embiid won the MVP and got better. Tyrese Maxey is going to be an All-Star and maybe even a Third Team All-NBA guy. There is so little to complain about with this team.
It’s also fair to wonder how much of this good vibes season is the result of hiring Nurse, and how much is the result of trading James Harden. Heck, there’s a case that this whole season is just a new-hire honeymoon so far. The Sixers are 22-10 right now, but were also 21-11 at this point during Doc’s first season in Philadelphia, when we were briefly convinced that the 2020 offseason makeover had solved everything.
But there’s one key difference between previous iterations of the Sixers and the one that Nurse has led this season — the Sixers aren’t predictable anymore.
The Sixers have been a good team each of the last six years, but they’ve never had the flexibility needed to beat the best teams in the NBA in a playoff series. Whether it was Harden’s pick and rolls, Embiid’s post-ups, or pre-2021 Ben Simmons’ drive and kick game, opponents always knew what the Sixers wanted to do and eventually figured out how to stop it.
Doc Rivers only added to that issue. He was and probably still can be a good NBA coach, and a lot of bereft franchises would’ve loved to have him. But his predictability and unwillingness to adjust were always fatal flaws. Whether it was his refusal to go away from all-bench lineups, or insistence on playing washed veterans over clearly capable young guys in Paul Reed and Isaiah Joe, Doc just wanted to do the same thing each time. And while the Sixers doing “the same thing” was good enough to beat bad first round teams, it’s always faltered against smarter second round teams.
Nurse is the opposite of predictable. He made his name in the coaching world with the Box-and-One defense he played against Steph Curry in the 2019 NBA Finals, and just two weeks ago he had the Sixers do the same in the second quarter of their win over the Minnesota Timberwolves, with Kelly Oubre tracking Anthony Edwards up and down the court.
The Sixers run the same FLIP and FAKE FLIP dribble hand-off actions all the time, but the dribble hand-off progression is meant to give the players freedom to read and react differently each time. They started every game for two weeks with the same Nic Batum post entry, but always used a different play design to set up a pass. They’ll play a 2-3 zone defense, something Doc was willing to do too, but Nurse always, and I mean ALWAYS, switches back to a man-to-man defense if the other coach calls a timeout to have their team make an adjustment. The Sixers never come out of a timeout in the same defense they were just in before the timeout with Nick Nurse at the controls.
Watch these two back-to-back defensive possessions the Sixers played against the Chicago Bulls in their home loss a couple of weeks ago. Billy Donovan called a timeout between the two possessions. Notice the adjustment Nurse makes here, and I will designate you as an official Ball Knower™.
Both teams make exactly zero [0] substitutions during the timeout. For the first four minutes of the game, the Sixers’ defensive matchups were as follows — Batum guarding Coby White, Tyrese Maxey on Ayo Dosunmu, Tobias Harris on DeMar DeRozan, and De’Anthony Melton on Pat Williams.
Nurse clearly like that gameplay to start, and it got the Sixers an early lead. But he decided he’d screw with Chicago out of the timeout. On that second possession — Batum on DeRozan, Maxey on White, Tobias on Pat Will, Melton on Dosunmu. Every non-Embiid player is guarding a new person, and suddenly the Bulls don’t know what to do. The play they spent three minutes in the huddle drawing up suddenly is attacking the wrong matchups and all out of sync. (Nurse also added to the chaos by telling the Sixers to switch everything out of the timeout, after the team had chased over screens for the first four minutes.)
Yes, this is a trivial little thing Nurse did in the first quarter of a disappointing December loss. But little stuff like this matters in the postseason, man.
Previous versions of the Sixers always got figured out. The 2021 Hawks figured out they could play multiple bigs and get away with it because of Ben Simmons. The 2023 Celtics (eventually) figured out that daring Harden to drive and finish at the rim would ruin the Sixers’ pick and roll game. A random scoring explosion from Shake Milton or rookie year Maxey might have felt like big changes in the moment during those series, but those were ultimately just one-off games that delayed the inevitable in the postseason.
Everything Nurse has done through two months has been about making the Sixers a less predictable bunch. Embiid added dribble hand-offs so his offense isn’t just short rolls and post-ups in the playoffs. Maxey is as likely to run 30 pick-and-rolls in a game as he is to spend the night flying off pin down screens for threes. Sometimes Nurse likes the backup center matchup enough to trust Mo Bamba over Reed, while other times he benches him in the second half for KJ Martin. No part of the game plan is immutable, all that matters is adjusting in a way that helps the Sixers win.
It’s reasonable if you don’t want to believe that this Sixers team is different. They’ve lost in the exact same excruciatingly painful way for six straight seasons. Just because most of us have liked Nurse and didn’t like Doc means that this is “The Year.”
But whenever I doubt this Sixers’ squad, I think back to all those random little adjustments Nurse makes. They feel different for the simple reason that they’re willing to do different, outside-the-box things on each and every possession.
I didn’t like it when the Sixers hired Nurse, and back in May of 2023, I thought this season would be a death march to a disappointing return in the Harden trade and an eventual Embiid trade request. Instead, this is the best Sixers team I’ve seen in my time, and a true contender with revamped future.
I wasn’t able to predict what Nick Nurse’s Sixers team was going to do — and that’s exactly the way he wanted it to be.