Nick Nurse was far from a household name. He wasn’t much of an NBA name, either. His path to the league had included stops in Britain and Iowa. He’d strutted the sidelines of fictional-sounding professional teams such as the Birmingham Bullets and Manchester Giants. But it didn’t take long for Green to notice that Nurse was different from other coaches. And not just because he carried a guitar on road trips or occasionally had his defense utilize a grade-school-style scheme. “He was always squatting on the sidelines,” Green recalled recently. “He’d be down there for a while, too. It was actually impressive.”