PHILADELPHIA — The Philadelphia 76ers finished the first season under coach Nick Nurse with some positives. Yes, they lost in first round of the playoffs to the New York Knicks in six games, but Nurse instilled a great deal of confidence and resilience into this group.
The Sixers battled through significant adversity as a group. The injuries to Joel Embiid, De’Anthony Melton, Robert Covington and even Tyrese Maxey for stretches made it tough to get everybody on the same page. Throw in the big James Harden trade and the deadline day moves and Nurse had to juggle a great deal in his first go-around.
“The season was kind of like that series,” Nurse said. “It was really difficult. I thought we had a lot of injury issues and stuff like that all year long, but I thought we fought. We tried to figure out a way to fight. Listen, when you’re coaching and you’ve got so much movement with who’s in and who’s out, you never get quite as organized or in sync or connectivity you’d love to have as a coach.”
Throughout the season, Nurse had to manage numerous pieces and seemingly endless rotation shuffling.
“It felt like we had to do a lot of stuff on the fly,” Nurse added. “A lot of stuff off the board. A lot of stuff like that. That makes it tough, but again, it is what it is. You gotta figure it out. That’s what it is. I think we’ve got a lot of work to do. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Nurse runs numerous unorthodox schemes. He needs everybody to buy into what he’s preaching, and everybody has to understand their parts in the team’s success. They didn’t have a chance to develop that continuity.
“There was a time we had a whole bunch of guys out,” Nurse added. “All anyone kept talking about was Joel was out, but we had a whole fleet of guys out, and the challenge was, can we get them to a compete level? Can we get out there and compete? We had to raise up our level of just competing. So I thought we did a really good job of that. We just keep teaching and coaching and filming and all that stuff, just trying to push them to get better and play harder.”
Nurse definitely got the Sixers to compete. They battled on a nightly basis, and Philadelphia was certainly competitive in number of games it shouldn’t have been. The Sixers needed to execute much better than they did. That will come with time.
“I thought we did a good job of that,” Nurse finished. “But no. I feel like nearly as enough of just — special situations, end-of-game stuff, ATO stuff, it was just probably not as sharp as I would’ve liked to have had it. I think they did really good. Even in a lot of these games, we ended up executing a lot. We got a lot of good shots and a lot of good buckets late in the game, so they were doing a lot of that off the board and they did a good job.”
Nurse will head into his first full offseason as coach of the Sixers. He knows the work that must be done. So does the front office. It will be interesting to see what happens next.
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