The Sixers’ Nick Nurse has had ups and downs in 22 games this season

There is probably a consensus among NBA fans that coaching is, at best, a marginal factor in a team’s success or failure. A good coach can take a team from mediocre to good or maybe even good to great, while a bad coach can stand in the way of a great team winning a championship or perhaps send a good team to the play-in tournament or out of the playoffs in total.

The Sixers are now in the hunt for a championship, more specifically after ending a 24-year drought without appearing in the Eastern Conference Finals, and as such they will likely need Nick Nurse on his A game to reach new heights . There are some NBA teams that are destined to win championships regardless of coach because their talent level is far superior to the rest of the league. The Sixers are not one of them. So while we continue to wait for them to play another game on Friday, now easily seems like a good time to evaluate Nurse with 22 games in the books.

There were a number of factors fans could cite for the slow start. In my opinion, Daryl Morey deserves most of the blame. Morey knew all offseason that Joel Embiid would be under load, and he probably knew the same was true for Paul George even before George suffered a knee injury before the season. The decision to bring back Kelly Oubre Jr. and Kyle Lowry while also signing Caleb Martin, Reggie Jackson and Andre Drummond was far too big a risk for a collection of veterans that couldn’t withstand the constant absences of Embiid and Georg.

However, Nurse is an extension of the front office. Even though he doesn’t have personnel control, there had to be a vision for what the team should look like in non-Embiid games and games where both Embiid and George were out. That vision definitely wasn’t that the Sixers would consistently lose games by double digits in the first month of the season. This was also because Jared McCain played surprisingly well as a rookie in the middle of the first round, which probably wasn’t expected. In this case, it’s likely an example of some suspect acquisitions by Morey, but also by Nurse not figuring out how to get the most out of the role players without Embiid and George.

When it comes to the games in which at least one of Embiid and George played, it wasn’t all great from Nurse either. Last Tuesday’s win in Charlotte caused a stir. George played 37 minutes while McCain was only on the pitch for 22 minutes, which ultimately resulted in a six-point win. It was also an efficient 22 minutes for the rookie, who scored 17 points on 7 of 10 shooting and 3 of 4 from the three-point line. The next night against Orlando, McCain played 39 minutes without George and Embiid. But by that point, McCain had already proven that he deserved at least 30 minutes a night, regardless of who else the Sixers had available.

A common criticism of Nurse, dating back to his time in Toronto, is that he tends to push starters deep and play 35 to 40 minutes a night against the top talent. George has played at least 35 minutes in three games so far in December. Tyrese Maxey was the only star who was available for Nurse on a somewhat regular basis, although Maxey missed a few weeks in November with a hamstring injury. Maxey is averaging 36.7 minutes per game in 16 games played so far this season. Maxey’s 37.5 minutes per game last season, Nurse’s first in Philly, was a career high in minutes per game. It seems like Nurse has been paying more attention to Embiid’s minutes, as he hasn’t played the former MVP for more than 35 minutes once in the five games he’s played so far in 2024-25.

Does Nurse play Maxey and George a lot because the team dug a hole in the first month of the season, or would he do that anyway? Maxey’s career high last season suggests that going for starters in the regular season is ingrained in Nurse’s coaching DNA. One would think that this might conflict with the team’s load management plans with Embiid and George. So we’ll see if they continue to keep Embiid’s playing time under the 35-minute limit.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to really judge Nurse too strongly. In some ways he’s to blame for the slow start, but if Nurse had tightened a few things up in the first six weeks of the season, how much better would the Sixers really be? The defeats were so one-sided to begin with that a coaching change here or there probably wouldn’t have turned too many of them into wins. The recent streak of four wins in five games should reassure fans that the players haven’t let Nurse down yet and that he’s starting to think about how to coach the team as George and Embiid become more available.

If this Sixers team performs so poorly in the first round of the playoffs or earlier that it suffers a loss, Morey will still bear most of the blame. Last summer was his offseason “clean slate,” if you will, and the early returns from his acquisitions alongside McCain and Guerschon Yabusele are pretty brutal. The team will likely add a player or two at the trade deadline, which would be another roster move by Morey and another reason to blame Morey most if the team makes the playoffs early.

That being said, Nurse monitors these players on a daily basis and would take some blame if such a departure occurred. Nurse is being praised for what could be the start of a long-awaited turnaround for the Sixers. But what about his performance throughout the season? Meh.