Nick Nurse by the numbers: How the new Sixers coach is different from Doc Rivers

What is Nurse's coaching record? What stats do his teams typically excel at? And what can fans expect from him now that he's coaching the Sixers?

New Sixers coach Nick Nurse doesn't have as much experience as you might think. But is that a bad thing?Read moreYONG KIM / Staff Photographer

by Matt Mullin

Published May 30, 2023, 4:31 p.m. ET

Nick Nurse was likely a familiar name for many in Philadelphia even before the 76ers decided Monday to hire him as their next head coach.

Nurse has had numerous battles with the Sixers — and Joel Embiid in particular — and was on the opposing sideline for one of the most heartbreaking moments in franchise history when Kawhi Leonard’s buzzer-beater bounced and bounced and bounced and bounced again before dashing what might’ve been the team’s best hopes for an NBA title.

Nurse, 55, feels like a veteran coach, and in many ways he is, winning a title, an NBA coach of the year award, and leading his team in more than 40 postseason games. So it might surprise some Sixers fans to learn that Nurse, who has felt like a constant thorn in the Sixers’ side during his 18 regular-season meetings (9-9) and two postseason series (1-1) against Philly, has just five total years of head coaching experience at the top level.

That’s a stark contrast to the person he’s replacing, Doc Rivers, who despite merely matching Nurse with one title and one coach of the year award, arrived in Philly with 22 years of NBA coaching experience and well over 900 wins under his belt. Aside from longevity and experience, however, there’s not much Rivers has on his resumé that Nurse does not.

For example, while Rivers has a slightly better regular-season winning percentage (.590, compared to Nurse’s .582) Nurse has a far superior postseason winning percentage (.610, compared to .516 for Rivers), even though he has coached far fewer playoff games (41, compared to 215 for Rivers).

But that level of experience cuts both ways, especially when the comparison is to someone like Rivers, who has failed to recapture a title in the years since his championship-winning season in Boston in 2007-08. Rivers has earned the reputation of a coach who is unable to make adjustments and whose teams have a tendency to choke away series leads — not unlike the Sixers just did against the Celtics.

Nurse, who has never lost a playoff series his team has led, does not have those same postseason knocks — at least not yet — and is viewed instead as a coach on the rise, not one entering the twilight of his career. It’s part of the reason he was among the finalists to coach in Milwaukee and Phoenix as well. The other part of that is what he’s able to get out of his players, and his willingness to get creative and mold his strategies to the team put in front of him, rather than trying to make the players fit his strategy.

Given that — and that fact that he never had a ball-dominant center like Embiid to build around — there’s a good chance these statistical rankings look different when it comes to the Sixers, but here’s a look at the stats Nurse’s Raptors teams excelled (and struggled) at over the last five seasons.

The one thing you’ll notice right away is that Nurse’s teams live to create turnovers — and the team’s defense was a big key to their early success in his first couple of seasons. And even in the two years in which the Raptors failed to make the playoffs, they still finished in the top half of the league in defensive rating and led the league in turnover percentage.

While there are many things likely to change under Nurse, the Sixers’ success on the defensive end is likely not going to be one of them. Of course, having a rim protector like Embiid should make that a little easier for the new coach.