Steph Curry couldn’t be muffled. He drilled 30-footers, slinked through the defense, dropped pretty floaters, and almost single-handedly powered the Warriors to a victory in Game 2 of the 2019 NBA Finals. He whipped perfect, quick passes out of traps that played into the Warriors’ hands. They looked like the vintage Dubs. When Curry is on, modern defenses have the resistance of cardboard against a tidal wave.

Trailing by 11 with the game dwindling down, Toronto Raptors head coach Nick Nurse was desperate. The youngest of nine siblings, an unknown interloper who played at the University of Northern Iowa, bouncing around the British Basketball League and the then-D-League before landing in Toronto as an assistant, Nurse was never supposed to be here: under the bright lights of the NBA Finals as a rookie coach, on the precipice of losing one of the biggest games of his career.

He certainly coached like he was playing with house money, whipping out a whiteboard and drawing up a scheme most playbooks abandon after junior varsity: the box-and-one, where one defender — Fred VanVleet, in this instance — hounds the scorer, while the other four defenders form a box around the paint that gravitates toward the threat. The Raptors’ mercurial leader and resident smartypants, Kyle Lowry, immediately co-signed, and they were off to the races.

Despite the fact that the Raptors lost the game, the ploy worked. They almost erased the deficit, and they bumped into a strategy that paid dividends throughout the rest of the series.

Eight months later, the box-and-one has become a weapon for coaches across the NBA looking for ways to slow down ball-handling scorers like James Harden and Trae Young. For the Raptors, whose spate of injuries has put them face-to-face with desperation routinely this season, the box-and-one became a stepping stone to more schemes rarely employed in the NBA: the triangle-and-two and two-three zones morphing into three-two zones. Down 30 points against the Mavericks in December, they came back behind a diamond full-court press. Despite their top six rotation players missing over 10 games this season, the Raptors are 40-15 and the East’s No. 2 seed, with a better record than they had at this time last year, when Kawhi Leonard was still on the team.

As a result, All-Star Weekend will feature plenty of red and white. Lowry and first-time All-Star Pascal Siakam will be joined by the coaching staff, the unsung heroes behind the Raptors’ never-say-die attitude who will coach Team Giannis.

Coach Nick Nurse is pushing all the right buttons for the Raptors. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer) More

Once upon a time, Nate Bjorkgren was a walk-on at the University of South Dakota, where Nurse was an assistant. Thirteen years later, he hassled Nurse until he let Bjorkgren join the then-Iowa Energy of the D-League as a volunteer assistant. Bjorkgren eventually made the payroll, and they won a title together, cementing a bond that’s turned Bjorkgren into the in-game Nurse whisperer. He is infectiously positive, always seeing the pathway to a comeback, and he has enough leeway to get on his boss. “When I’m constantly saying we’re in trouble, we ain’t got it, we’re not moving, what’s wrong with us? Blah, blah, blah,” Nurse said. “I get those out and he’s got me back on track. He might say, ‘Do something then! Change defenses or something!’”

From there, Nurse might tinker with one of assistant coach Adrian Griffin’s defensive sets. “I think the one thing that's special about Coach Nurse, from working with him, is that he always enhances what you bring to him,” Griffin said during the NBA Finals. “We all have thoughts and they're always good, [but] he seems to make them great.” He is the only former NBA player among the core assistants, the survivor turned lifer who has seen it all as a coach and a player, making hay on defense and wrangling mercurial players.

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