Wednesday night’s game was over. The 76ers had beaten the Minnesota Timberwolves, and now the music was swelling in the Wells Fargo Center: Clap your hands, everybody …
Etc., etc.
T-Wolves coach Chris Finch rose from his seat on the team’s bench and headed toward midcourt to share best wishes with his counterpart, Nick Nurse. It was no idle gesture. The two of them go back nearly three decades. They have coached against each other, and they have coached with each other.
“We’ve been circling around each other,” Finch said a few days earlier, “our entire lives.”
Circling each other, at one point in their lives, like Ali and Frazier. But it is different now. Now, Finch said, they are “very close.” If they were once rivals, they are now competitors, two 50-somethings – Nurse is 56, Finch 54 – who have seen the passage of time whittle away their sharper edges.
Finch, when asked about Nurse, mentioned the 2011 NBA Development League Finals, when Nurse’s Iowa Energy beat Finch’s Rio Grande Valley Vipers. And Nurse, when asked about Finch, mentioned the final game of the 1998-99 British Basketball League (BBL) regular season, when Terrell Myers (a St. Joe’s product) hit a buzzer-beating jumper to lift Finch’s Sheffield Sharks over Nurse’s Manchester Giants. That secured for the Sharks the top seed heading into the postseason.
“That one does stick with me,” Nurse said before Wednesday’s game.
Understand that that’s just how guys like this are wired. Finch once said that two losses grate him more than any others – one to Wisconsin-Platteville in the NCAA Division III championship game his junior year at Franklin & Marshall, the other to a Brett Brown-coached Australia club when he was England’s head coach (and Nurse was his assistant) in the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
But recently he amended that list.
“I hold onto them all,” he said.
Oh, and his record against Nurse?
“Damn near .500,” he said. “England, G-League, the NBA – it’s pretty close.”
Competitors – always, always, always. But rivals? Not anymore. That’s for the younger, hot-blooded versions of themselves. For guys who first crossed paths in 1995-96. Nurse, an Iowa native, was in his first year as the coach at Birmingham of the BBL. Finch, who grew up near Reading and played at Wilson High, was in the last of his four seasons playing for Sheffield.
The next season, Finch moved to the bench, where he would remain for six years and coach against Nurse as he hopscotched from Birmingham to Manchester to London to Brighton. The Sheffield-Manchester rivalry was particularly fierce, as it involved two cities of about a half-million people in Central England, about 45 minutes apart.
“And we really didn’t know each other or talk to each other,” Nurse said of Finch.
Things began to thaw, Nurse said, when he invited Finch to a Christmas party in 1999 at his home in Manchester.
“From then on, we were friends,” Nurse said.
They would collaborate on the British national team beginning in 2006, positions they would retain even as Finch’s pro career took him to Germany and Belgium, and as Nurse landed in what was then known as the D-League, but was later rebranded the G-League.
Nurse encouraged Finch to join him in the minors, believing it would expand his knowledge base and increase his career prospects. Finch hesitated at first.
“I was on a really good path in Europe, making good money,” he said. “I was never afraid of betting on myself, but by the same token …”
Eventually he relented, and was hired in 2009 to coach Rio Grande Valley, the Houston Rockets’ affiliate. He spent two years there before being promoted to an assistant’s role with the parent club, and was succeeded at RGV by … Nurse.
Finch lobbied for Rockets general manager Daryl Morey (now with the Sixers) to elevate Nurse, to no avail; Nurse headed off to become a Toronto assistant in 2013, and five years later moved up to head coach. And in 2020 – two seasons after he won an NBA championship – he hired Finch as an assistant, Finch having followed five seasons in Houston with assistants’ stints in Denver and New Orleans.
Finch, who had come to be known for his offensive acumen, said he received “a master class” in defensive creativity when he worked with Nurse in Toronto, that he was able to get “those defensive juices flowing again.” That served him well when he took the Minnesota job in February 2021, as the T-Wolves were particularly deficient at that end of the floor.
Fast-forward to this season, which finds the T-Wolves with the league’s top-rated defense, and, not coincidentally, tied with Boston for the best record – 21-6 – as Minnesota followed up Wednesday’s loss with a home victory over the Lakers. The rejuvenation of three-time Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert, acquired before last season, has helped; his shot-blocking, which lagged in ‘22-23, is back to 2.4 a game, which is in line with his career norm.
The T-Wolves have a bunch of other long, stringy defenders, and at the offensive end boast a budding star in fourth-year guard Anthony Edwards, as well as veteran forward Karl-Anthony Towns, of whom Finch said the following: “His superpower is his efficiency.”
Finch has been able to figure out the spacing between his two bigs, something he had previously done when he coached Anthony Davis and DeMarcus Cousins in New Orleans, while also giving Edwards room to operate.
Towns’ receptiveness to change has been critical to that. Finch remembers putting it this way to the three-time All-Star: “You were used to being the sun, and people revolve around you. Now you’re a planet. You’ve got to find your own orbit. You’ve got to revolve around others.”
As a result, Edwards is averaging 24 points a game and Towns 22, while flirting with the 50-40-90 club – i.e., respective percentages from the floor, 3-point arc and foul line.
None of this surprises Nurse.
“He’s always been in my mind, like, unbelievable offensively – like as good as I’ve ever seen,” he said of Finch. “He used to kill us with smallball back at Sheffield, and now he’s got big ball.”
Finch volleyed the praise right back at Nurse.
“He’s the best coach I’ve ever worked with,” he said. “He’s so creative. He checks all the boxes.”
Doesn’t mean they don’t want to beat each other’s brains in. There’s still a scoreboard, still standings. Nobody gets graded on a curve.
That explains Finch’s demeanor as he took the court before Wednesday’s game. His five assistants joined various support personnel – 12 people in all – in forming two parallel lines outside the locker-room door, as they do before every game. When Finch emerged, there were hoots and cheers. He dapped everybody up as he went down the line and toward the tunnel that opens onto the court, but his expression betrayed no joy. Rather he wore a thousand-yard stare, the look of a man whose mind was going in a thousand different directions.
There were immediate hints of how the game was going to go. Twenty-two seconds into the first quarter, Gobert was whistled for a questionable foul, and he drew his second personal before the game was four minutes old. By period’s end Towns also had two fouls, as did Minnesota’s top backup big, Naz Reid.
The T-Wolves nonetheless hung around for three quarters, but had no answers for Joel Embiid, who poured in 51 points, and Tyrese Maxey, who had 35. The final was 127-113, Philadelphia, and afterward Finch, who was T’d up late in the game, deftly critiqued the officiating, calling the initial foul on Gobert “kind of a nothing call” that “kind of put us on our heels.”
At the same time he admitted his club was too sloppy on one end, and not stout enough on the other. Desperate for answers, Finch even tried small forward Kyle Anderson on Embiid for a few second-half possessions, which ended, predictably, with a thunderous Embiid slam.
It was Embiid’s 12th straight game with at least 30 points and 10 rebounds, the longest such streak since the NBA-ABA merger, and his fifth straight with at least 35 points, which equals a franchise record. Hat tip to him, but it is also clear Nurse has unlocked his star’s full potential with the two-man actions he runs with Maxey.
In other words, the defensive coach is showing his offensive chops. Even did it against an old friend, an offensive guy who has rededicated himself to D.
“You’ve got to be able to coach both sides,” Nurse said.
Well after the game, Finch trudged toward the team bus. A backpack was slung over his left shoulder, and he was rolling a wheeled suitcase with his right hand. His expression was again that of a man who had a lot on his mind.
Another game was fewer than 24 hours away, and the end of the regular season is far in the distance. Yeah, his team had fallen short in a meeting with a coach who long ago had been a rival, and has since become a friend. But there was no time to think about that now. There were other challenges ahead, other matters that demanded his attention.
Any thoughts of the next reunion will have to wait. Given the way both teams are playing, it’s not inconceivable to think that that might come in June. For these two fierce competitors, that would be something to savor, something to hold forever.