It’s funny where life can take you, if you have enough, if you give it everything. Way back when, Nick Nurse happened to be in England when Masai Ujiri was in England. They’d land in Belgium at the same time, too, both times on different teams. Ujiri knew Nurse was like him, one of the thousands of lifers chasing basketball wherever they could.
“I got probably a little antsy as a young coach because I thought I had a lot of ideas, and I thought that I had to try them, and I had to go get a team somewhere,” said Nurse, the head coach of the Toronto Raptors, after being named the 2019-20 NBA coach of the year in a landslide vote.