You can learn a lot about yourself going through what the Toronto Raptors went through for two incredible months on their march to an NBA championship, two months of tension and stress and excitement and hard work under almost unbearable scrutiny.
And when Nick Nurse is asked when he learned about himself in that career-defining journey that culminated in a magical Game 6 in Oakland’s Oracle Arena last June, the team’s head coach doesn’t take long at all to come up with the one thing that stood out.
“One of the things is that the deeper we went last year, the calmer I felt and that was a little bit of a strange feeling,” he said this past week.