How Nick Nurse’s and Daryl Morey’s Houston Rockets ties led to their reunion with the Sixers

A meeting between Daryl Morey and Nick Nurse more than a decade ago covered an unorthodox defensive strategy utilized by 12-year-old girls in Northern California, which had become the subject of a Malcolm Gladwell think piece in the New Yorker about how David beats Goliath.

The team solely played “maniacal” full-court press and trapping defense, even during a game when only four players showed up.

Morey, then the Houston Rockets’ general manager, took that concept a step further, pondering what would happen if a team consistently went four-on-five while on defense, with one player permanently stationed at the offensive end of the floor. Nurse, then the coach of the G League (then known as the D League) affiliate Rio Grande Valley Vipers, not only considered the idea but built upon it. He inferred that, because of the court’s size and ball’s flight time on a shot and rebound, if a defender closed out on a shooter and then just kept running toward the opposite side, he would still create the desired numbers advantage.

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“We were actually sort of sure that wasn’t actually a good idea,” Morey recently recalled in a phone conversation with The Inquirer, “but we wanted to give it a try. … It’s just little stuff like that, where [Nurse is] bringing his practical experience while we’re trying to experiment.”

That’s a glimpse inside the origin of the partnership between Morey and Nurse, which has come back around with the 76ers. Morey, the Sixers’ president of basketball operations since 2020, and Nurse, who is in his first season as head coach, have been tasked with channeling their creative basketball minds into finally pushing a team with unfulfilled championship aspirations across the finish line.

A Monday matinee game for the Sixers (24-13) against the Rockets provides a reminder of how their collaboration began, and why that familiarity so far has been advantageous in this Philly reunion.

“Where the relationship enhances what’s happened is the speed at which we can move things along,” Nurse told The Inquirer from his office at the Wells Fargo Center on Friday morning. “Because we know each other, it’s not this ‘Where’s this guy coming from?’ six-month process. That part I think has been a big plus.”

Morey’s and Nurse’s roots can be traced back to Chris Finch, now the Minnesota Timberwolves’ coach who preceded Nurse as Rio Grande’s leader. When his current team visited Philly on Dec. 20, Finch quipped, “I like it when my worlds collide.”

Finch and Nurse are longtime friends, dating to when they coached against each other in the British Basketball League in the 1990s and 2000s, and then alongside each other with that country’s national team. In 2009, Finch’s agent got him connected with Morey about the Vipers’ head coaching job. Nurse, who by then had moved back stateside to coach the G League’s Iowa Wolves, encouraged Finch to take it.

“I think I’ve really gotten better as a coach by making that move,” Nurse told Finch.

While Finch was with Rio Grande Valley, Morey learned that Nurse remained one of Finch’s top confidants. They all had a natural affinity for those who “grind their way through the minor leagues before they make it,” Morey said, because “it shows some perseverance and some ability to stand out from the crowd.” And that translated to on-court success, with Nurse’s Wolves beating Finch’s Vipers in the 2011 G League Finals.

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When Finch was promoted to a Rockets assistant coach after that, Morey naturally targeted Nurse. Nurse, meanwhile, was intrigued to dive into an environment that Finch had described as “a PhD in basketball analytics at the time.”

“I remember Nick was just eating it up and enjoying it,” Finch said. “It just kind of got his brain going, and [he] brought his own ideas to further enhance what Daryl and those guys wanted us to try to do.

“They told us to just go break the mold and just kind of be experimental with whatever we felt might work at the next level, that we didn’t want to risk at the next level.”

Nurse and Morey discussed basketball strategy such as a shot profile heavy on three-pointers, to which Nurse then tailored his schematic installation, practice drills, and player development. During the summer, Nurse then became a de facto member of the Rockets’ scouting department — “completely out of his job description, actually,” Morey said, “but we wanted his insights” — while they pored over draft prospects and free-agent targets late into the night, only breaking to grab fast food.

Those long hours in the facility are when Nurse said he “really got to know” Morey.

“You’re not afraid to work, and you’re not afraid to value my opinion,” Nurse said of Morey, “even though I’m this little British coach and a minor-league coach. I put together my own teams for 20 years, and you’re willing to at least open that door and have those conversations.

“Hopefully, we were learning from each other.”

Morey’s misstep, according to Finch, was allowing Nurse to “get out of the stable,” rather than eventually promoting him to the Rockets’ staff. Looking back, Morey agrees, calling it a “what-could-have-been” moment he shied away from with Nurse (and Finch) because of the “perceived risk” of hiring a rookie NBA coach to lead a win-now franchise.

Instead, Nurse joined the Toronto Raptors in 2013, first as an assistant before being elevated to head coach when Dwane Casey was fired in 2018. That team then became appointment viewing for a “jealous” Morey, who noticed Nurse’s innovative style long before the coach pulled out a box-and-one defense during the NBA Finals.

“For a while, [the Rockets] were on the forefront of what we thought was everything in the NBA,” Morey said. “And then here I saw Toronto doing some things that I thought were past us. For me, it inspired us to really study what they were doing and try to adopt what they were coming up with.”

Nurse’s Raptors, of course, topped the Sixers in an epic playoff Game 7 on their way to that 2019 championship, while Morey was still in Houston. Those teams faced off again in the 2022 first round, Morey’s second season in Philly. Because of NBA tampering rules, Nurse and Morey typically did not share much more than pleasantries when their paths crossed as competitors.

Yet when the Sixers fired former coach Doc Rivers and the Raptors let Nurse go last spring, both parties were eager for an in-depth discussion. During an initial interview that Morey estimates lasted five or six hours, topics ranged from Nurse’s strategies with the Raptors to how he game-planned for the Sixers as an opposing coach to what he would have done differently in the Sixers’ seven-game playoff loss to the Boston Celtics.

“All of it’s coming out now,” Nurse said.

Added Morey: “Just trying to understand where he had evolved in the 10 years we were apart. … It was more us just trying to pick each other’s brains.”

The months since have confirmed to Morey how much Nurse continued to sharpen his coaching toolbox in their decade apart.

The executive was initially impressed by a philosophy presentation “all set to fun music” to begin training camp, creating “quick buy-in” with players. Nurse, meanwhile, describes his daily rapport with Morey as “very easy” to “ask for what I think we need, and explain why,” while constructing an aggressive defense and movement-heavy offense surrounding reigning NBA Most Valuable Player Joel Embiid. Although Morey regularly asks Nurse how various trade scenarios — the deadline looms on Feb. 8 — would impact the Sixers’ rotation and the players involved, the executive said he has not “had to be too involved on the coaching side, and that’s where I prefer it.”

And just like when they discussed a 12-year-old girls’ basketball team’s unorthodox defensive strategy all those years ago, Nurse feels empowered to “throw out my ideas — like, all of them” in this Sixers reunion with Morey.

“There is a building process, even though this is ‘win yesterday,’ ” Nurse said. “… [Morey has] been enjoyable to work for and on board and received a lot of the ideas and helped us start this.”