Nick Nurse knows it is tempting to retool old game plans at this stage of the season. By now everyone in the league has played everyone else at least once, and the Raptors’ first-year head coach says it’s easy to assume a strategy that worked earlier in the season would work again.
But heading into Friday’s prime-time ESPN matchup with the Portland Trail Blazers, Nurse says he is less focused on previous results — Portland won the teams’ first game 128-122 — than he is on current form. Entering Friday, Portland had won five straight games, a win streak that started last week against the Western Conference-leading Golden State Warriors, and continued through the first half of the Blazers’ East Coast road trip.