OAKLAND, Calif.—If you’ve trusted Nick Nurse to this point — and he’s the only coach in Raptors history to guide the team to within one win of a championship, so he’s clearly scribbling out the script with some measure of skill — then it only makes sense to trust the instinct that told him he needed to call back-to-back timeouts with 3:05 remaining in the fourth quarter of Monday’s Game 5 of the NBA Finals.
In some ways, sure, the move was counterintuitive. All playoffs long, Nurse has talked about the importance of momentum in successfully navigating the wild swings of basketball’s post-season.