Nick Nurse Explains His Strange Casual Technical Foul Against Charlotte

Toronto Raptors coach Nick Nurse got rung up for one of the strangest technical foul calls in NBA history and here's why it happened

Aaron Rose | Mar 16, 2021

Jim Dedmon-USA TODAY Sports

Toronto Raptors coach Nick Nurse might have made some unfortunate NBA history on Saturday night.

Trailing the Charlotte Hornets 111-91 with 3:34 to go in the fourth quarter, Nick Nurse leaned over to Tony Brothers to ask 26-year NBA referee a casual question. Then, seemingly out of nowhere Brothers hit Nurse with maybe the most casual technical foul call in NBA history.

Nick Nurse got maybe the most casual technical foul in NBA history 😅 pic.twitter.com/od8uSQG15U
— NBA on ESPN (@ESPNNBA) March 14, 2021

Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?

What on earth could Nurse have possibly done to deserve that technical foul?

Well, Nurse shed some light on it Tuesday afternoon with CityNews' Lindsay Dunn.

"Yeah that's pretty funny," Nurse said. "Just to be sure it was a casual technical. I was talking to them I said 'dude, I'm down 30, I don't even care right now, and your boy over there, can we get your boy over there just to call one foul.' He says 'you can't talk about my partner.'"

Boom. Technical foul.

"Anyway, that was money not very well spent," Nurse joked.

In the Raptors' following game on Sunday, Kyle Lowry got an equally perplexing technical foul called against him late against the Chicago Bulls when he appeared to flip the ball over to a referee at the other side of the court.

"I don’t ever talk about the officials but this is crazy," Lowry said. "I really didn’t do anything. The first tech, all I said was I was talking to my teammates, and I told them we gotta play through the BS, just keep working fellas and I got one. And the second one, I just threw the ball. It don’t matter, as long as I throw the ball to an official."

Well, that was enough for his second technical of the game and his eighth of the season. Altogether, the whole sequence cost Lowry $10,000 for the two technical and the ejection. So far this year, Lowry has made $40,000 worth of charitable donations to the league and its affiliated charities.

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