Back
Raptors Coach Nurse ‘Decompressing’ After Playoff Loss
Toronto Raptors head coach Nick Nurse says he is still taking time to “decompress” after a strange NBA season.
The season started with a championship banner raising at Scotiabank Arena, was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic and ended in a narrow playoff defeat to the Boston Celtics.
The start date for the new season has yet to be announced and Nurse says he and his men will be ready.
“We’re still fresh off the season. We’re certainly in decompress mode right now. It was a little more stressful maybe,” Nurse said. “We do need a little more time to put that season behind us. So we’ll do that now and wait until we hear what the information will be as far as going forward.”
Nurse doesn’t expect his off-season preparations to look much different to previous years despite the current uncertainty.
“I would say that as soon as we find out a start date for next season, we’ll kind of plot in everything retroactively like we would have,” he said. “We’d have a three-week training camp, so we’ll have a three-week training camp. We’ll have maybe three weeks of pre-season and voluntary workouts prior to that three weeks like we would have had normally.”
The NBA’s reigning coach of the year has signed a new multi-year contract with Toronto and he said his future was never in doubt.
“I’ve loved being here, loved the job, and there’s nothing not to love man,” Nurse said. “It was time to renew a contract, and that’s what we did. It was really easy.”
/Stewart Sports news editor
