Nick Nurse & Fred VanVleet Discuss How Far the Raptors Have Come Defensively On their Trek Toward Another Championship

The Toronto Raptors have gone from one of the league's worst defensive teams to a group of feisty defenders that nobody is going to want to see in the playoffs

Aaron Rose | Apr 6, 2022

Nick Turchiaro-USA TODAY Sports

Toronto Raptors coach Nick Nurse couldn’t help but laugh as he thought back to opening night against the Washington Wizards.

His team had just wrapped up what appeared to be an impressive preseason, and, despite their young age, they looked like a team that was ready to compete this year. Then they took the court against Washington on that October night, and everything went south. A 26-point first quarter gave way to a 31-point second quarter for Washington and Toronto was quickly run off the court.

“That team wasn’t quite ready for the season opener,” Nurse joked.

It wasn’t that the offense was so bad, though 30.9% shooting from the floor that night left a lot to be desired. The problem for that team was on the defensive end. For the first quarter of the season, the Raptors looked like anything but the Raptors. They ranked 26th in the NBA in defense through 20 games and it certainly showed.

“We could not execute switching our defensive schemes,” Nurse said Tuesday night after his team clinched its seventh playoff appearance in the last eight years. “Every time we switched to zone it was wide open. Every time we switched to blitzing, we weren't making the rotations. Every time we were trying to do whatever we were trying to do; we just weren’t doing it at all.”

When Nurse thinks about that 2019 championship team, he doesn’t think about the offensive firepower that group had with Kawhi Leonard, Kyle Lowry, and a half dozen other players who could seemingly get their shots off against anyone. Instead, he remembers how defensively stout that group was. They were crisp in rotations. They could cover for one another, whizzing around, switching, and moving as a cohesive unit. If Nurse wanted to throw a zone defense at an opposing team or draw up a box-and-one against Steph Curry in the middle of a game, they could do it without a hiccup.

This 2021-22 Raptors team isn’t there. As Fred VanVleet joked Tuesday night, there are still plenty of mistakes, but compared to the start of the year, this team is a lot closer now than anyone could have seen coming.

Against Atlanta Hawks, for example, one of the most offensively explosive teams in the league, the Raptors switched between defensive schemes with relative ease. When their pick-and-roll coverages against Trae Young weren’t working, Nurse came up with something else. When that didn’t work, they changed things up again and again, even throwing some box-and-one at the All-Star guard.

“I think we’ve come a long way, a really long way and that's the exciting part when you think about the playoffs. This team has the potential to do it now,” VanVleet said. “Being that I've seen what it looks like to have the championship level, you know, we still got a ways to go there. But we're certainly a long way from where we started.”

That speaks to the quality of Toronto’s coaching staff that remained steadfast in its determination to implement its complex defensive schemes knowing it would eventually pay off as well as the development of the Raptors’ young core. Nurse wasn’t going to compromise his principles because his players couldn’t get on the same page defensively. Instead, he stuck it out through the painful losses and mounting frustration because he knew someday they would get there.

The Raptors aren’t going to win a championship this year. They're good defensively but not that good. Instead, the goal for this team, as Nurse said, was to make the playoffs, get experience, and come back better for it. In that sense, they’ve accomplished the mission, and the improvements they've made defensively have them well ahead of schedule.

Further Reading