Can Nick Nurse get the Toronto Raptors over the hump?

New Toronto Raptors head coach Nick Nurse inherits a 59-win team under enormous pressure this season. Is he up for the challenge?

Though the Toronto Raptors won a franchise-record 59 games last season, another disheartening playoff sweep at the hands of LeBron James caused them to make wholesale changes. In May, they fired head coach Dwane Casey — who would go on to win Coach of the Year — and two months later, they shipped DeMar DeRozan, Jakob Poeltl and a protected first-round pick to the San Antonio Spurs for Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green.

That puts new head coach Nick Nurse under more pressure than the other three first-year skippers combined.

While Lloyd Pierce and Igor Kokoskov have the luxury of overseeing rebuilds in Atlanta and Phoenix, respectively, Nurse will be immediately tasked with creating an environment that convinces Leonard to stay in Toronto beyond the 2018-19 season. Seeing as Leonard is reportedly eyeing a move to Los Angeles next summer, according to ESPN.com’s Adrian Wojnarowski, it may take an NBA Finals berth to keep him around.

If last season is any indication, Nurse will be up for the challenge.

After James and the Cavaliers swept the Raptors in the 2017 playoffs, Toronto general manager Masai Ujiri stressed the need for a “culture reset.” Rather than blow the roster apart and start anew, Ujiri instead wanted the Raptors to alter their style of play.

“Now it’s time to address and see if we can move the ball more and figure out a way to pass the ball more to get better options,” he said at his season-ending press conference. “And use the players that we have. I don’t think this is matter of changing players or anything like that. How do we change a little bit of how we play and how we approach the game?”

Much of that responsibility fell upon Nurse, who was no stranger to experimentation.

Prior to joining the Raptors as an assistant coach in 2013, Nurse spent two years overseeing the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, the Houston Rockets’ G League affiliate. During both of his years at the helm, the Vipers led the G League in 3-point attempts and pace. When Rio Grande won the G League championship in 2012-13, a whopping 31.5 percent of its field-goal attempts came from downtown. In the NBA that season, the league-average 3-point rate was 24.3 percent.

“I went to Houston to learn,” Nurse told Brandon Hurley of the Daily Times Herald. “They made it into a laboratory for me. It honestly was like a research project.”

When the Raptors tasked him with overhauling their offense this past summer, he applied the lessons he learned in Rio Grande.

“More ball movement, more unpredictability,” he told Hurley. “Everybody touches the ball.”

During the 2016-17 season, the Raptors ran the sixth-highest percentage of isolation plays leaguewide, while they ranked 29th in assist ratio. That predictability made them easy to defend in the playoffs, as the lack of ball movement led to stagnant possessions if Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan weren’t going off.

This past season, the Raptors were 22nd in isolation possessions and sixth in assist ratio. They went from averaging 273.4 passes per game in 2016-17 — the fourth-lowest mark across the NBA — to an even 300.0 in 2017-18. That ball movement helped them finish with the league’s third-best offense, trailing only the Warriors and the Rockets.

“The production in the playoffs was quite different than it was in the regular season,” Nurse told CBS Sports’ James Herbert this past December. “So to combat that, we’re trying to raise our number of assisted baskets in the playoffs, and we’re trying to be much more unpredictable. Instead of a dozen or so set plays that when you get to playoff times, teams can sit on, we’re trying to have a bunch of actions — maybe multiple actions in one series or reactions to how things get guarded and being able to counter those things.”

Nurse also tweaked the Raptors’ shot profile, reducing their reliance on mid-range jumpers and increasing their 3-point output. In 2016-17, Toronto attempted 20.3 mid-range shots per game, the 12th-highest-mark leaguewide. This past season, that slid to a miniscule 12.4 attempts per game, the fifth-lowest of any team. Meanwhile, the Raptors’ rate of 3-point attempts jumped from 28.9 percent in 2016-17 (22nd leaguewide) to 37.7 percent (fifth) this past year.

Nurse planted the seeds for that drastic transformation during training camp, according to Bleacher Report’s Yaron Weitzman. During scrimmages, corner 3-pointers counted as four points, while “any shot beyond the paint but inside the 3-point line was either worth zero points or, occasionally, it would result in a demerit,” Weitzman wrote.

The mind games worked. No team attempted more left corner 3s than the Raptors (4.8 per game), and they were fourth overall in corner treys (8.4), trailing only the Rockets (10.0), Cavaliers (8.6) and Jazz (8.5).

“There’s a difference between saying, ‘OK, let’s shoot a lot of threes’ versus being really good at being able to empower players and put them in the right spots,” David Nurse, Nick’s nephew and an NBA skills trainer, told Weitzman. “What Nick’s really great at is empowering the players on the court.”

If anything, the Raptors figure to swing even further in that direction this season. DeRozan attempted a career-high 3.6 triples per game last season, but he hit only 28.8 percent of them. Leonard, meanwhile, shot 38.0 percent from deep on 5.2 attempts per game during the 2016-17 campaign, and Green is a career 39.5 percent 3-point shooter.

On offense, Nurse will dig back into his Rio Grande roots and treat the regular season as an 82-game laboratory for testing out different lineup combinations.

“I just have found, in my experiences, we start doing a lot of things in the playoffs because there’s more chances for adjustments, there’s more things happening that are unexpected — even though you’re playing the same teams — that you haven’t really worked on enough,” Nurse told Herbert in July. “So, yeah, I would expect to test a few more things in the regular season just in case.”

Defense is the bigger mystery for Toronto this season. The Raptors had the fifth-best defense last year, making them the only team with top-five rankings on both ends of the floor, but Nurse isn’t planning to be complacent.

“We’re really going to make it a focus of trying to create more turnovers,” he told Dave Feschuk of the Toronto Star in July.

The Raptors were tied last season with the Celtics and Heat for the 13th-best opponent turnover rate in the league (14.3 percent), but swapping out a mediocre defender in DeRozan for a two-time Defensive Player of the Year in Leonard should pay dividends. In Leonard, Green and rising second-year forward OG Anunoby, Toronto will have an interchangeable set of wings who can switch matchups throughout any given possession. Though the Raptors will no longer have to go through James to get to the NBA Finals, the likes of Jayson Tatum, Gordon Hayward, Ben Simmons, Victor Oladipo and Giannis Antetokounmpo still may await as playoff roadblocks.

Switching will have its limits, especially since point guards Kyle Lowry and Fred VanVleet may struggle to guard larger players. In July, Nurse told Ryan Wolstat of the Toronto Sun that he’s already eyeing ways to mitigate those concerns.

“Kyle’s going to be on the floor, Fred’s going to be on the floor a lot, so we’ve got to be able to come up with something defensively, where we’re protecting not only them but our bigs,” he said. “So we don’t end up coming down the floor and just after a couple of (opposing screens or movements) Kyle and Fred are inside and Jonas (Valanciunas) and Serge (Ibaka) are outside,” Nurse said.

“We’ve got to come up with something (to prevent that) and I’ve got some thoughts and ideas on that and I’m going to have to polish that up, experiment with that a little bit and try to do some things maybe we haven’t done in the past.”

Experimentation figures to be the prevailing theme of the Raptors’ 2018-19 campaign. As a first-time NBA head coach, Nurse will undoubtedly go through some growing pains, but he deserves the benefit of the doubt after dramatically improving Toronto’s offensive schemes last season.

If the Raptors take similar strides forward on defense this year, they could well represent the Eastern Conference in the NBA Finals.

Unless otherwise noted, all stats via NBA.com or Basketball Reference. All salary information via Basketball Insiders.