Nick Nurse’s summer mood has long been dictated by how the just-completed season unfolded. So naturally, the 76ers’ coach spent much of this past offseason in a state of, in his words, “[ticked]-off-edness.”
The Sixers’ woeful, injury-plagued 24-58 season sent Nurse and his team home much sooner than they ever would have anticipated months earlier, when they had championship aspirations. The irritation lingered.
And lingered.
“It kind of fatigues you mentally and you’re just kind of constantly thinking about it,” the 58-year-old Nurse recently told The Inquirer. “And then, at some point, you’re like, ‘OK, tomorrow I’m getting up at 5:30, and we’re going to start going to work. We’ve got to make a move here.’
“And then that’s kind of what the rest of the summer becomes.”
That methodical approach has yielded a surprising 4-0 start to the Sixers’ 2025-26 season, even with Paul George and Jared McCain sidelined with injuries and Joel Embiid limited while working his way back from an ongoing knee issue. They rallied from a 19-point deficit to top the Washington Wizards in overtime Tuesday night, already their third double-digit comeback victory of the season.
Last season, it took the Sixers until Nov. 30 to record their fourth win. And though it is far too early to make sweeping declarations of a guaranteed turnaround, the Sixers have flashed an on-court identity — and palpable juice — that make good on Nurse’s public vow that “I want you to walk away from the game saying, ‘Jesus, they played their [butts] off tonight.’ That’s it.”
“You could feel his frustration, feel his pain,” said Minnesota Timberwolves coach Chris Finch, one of Nurse’s close friends. “And, generally, when we’ve all been through a season or a situation like that, there’s an incredible focus on where we need to start going into it the following year. …
“You [could] sense the confidence in their ability to do that when I talked to him this summer.”
For Nurse, that summer evaluation always begins with a self-debrief, which he acknowledges is not unlike how his brain operates daily. He is constantly thinking about the puzzle of fusing his coaching philosophy — “what you think is the absolute best way of doing anything, regardless” — with roster strengths and weaknesses.
Tactically, Nurse concluded that the Sixers must play a faster-paced, free-flowing offense that could succeed even when Embiid — the perennial All-Star and 2022-23 MVP who has been the franchise’s centerpiece for much of the past decade — inevitably missed time. That emphasis was first raised to dynamic point guard Tyrese Maxey (who totaled another 39 points and 10 assists Tuesday in Washington) during his exit interview with Nurse, president of basketball operations Daryl Morey, and general manager Elton Brand. It became even more imperative when the Sixers drafted VJ Edgecombe, a hyper-athletic guard.
But pace does not only mean how quickly the ball travels up and down the floor. Nurse said he, simply, “just wanted more passing. I just wanted the ball to touch more hands.”
The coaching staff began to implement those concepts — and individual skill development plans aligned with them — with younger players during summer league and workouts in Los Angeles, where assistant Rico Hines stages renowned pickup games. When everybody reconvened in Philly after Labor Day for informal team sessions, Nurse harped on the strength and conditioning required to attack the basket and play relentlessly on both ends of the floor. They scrimmaged without calling fouls, a style veteran center Andre Drummond called “prison ball.”
“All those things that kind of enable you to play with some toughness [and] physicality,” Nurse said, “push through when you think you’re tired, that you’re not.”
Returning players such as Adem Bona and Quentin Grimes described Nurse as more “direct” and “intense” while teaching schemes and principles during training camp practices. Kelly Oubre Jr. added that “Nurse has been putting us through the wringer.”
Yet newcomer Dominick Barlow said Nurse’s style and personality falls between his previous two NBA coaches, San Antonio Spurs legend Gregg Popovich and the Atlanta Hawks’ Quin Snyder. Jabari Walker, who also is in his first season in Philly, said he recently swung by Nurse’s office to thank him for giving him the confidence to shoot three-pointers.
“He stopped practice a couple times, saying, ‘That’s the one I want you to shoot,’” Walker said. “I think that’s just so helpful for players, because we overthink the game and we’re playing with such great guys [that] we don’t know when we should shoot sometimes.
“Having a coach that really believes in you allows you to just take that step back and trust your work. [You] even want to play harder for a leader like that, just because he instills so much in you.”
Nurse also can tap back into past experiences on his wide-ranging coaching journey of when a team responded to a disappointing season with a significant bounce-back.
After five years coaching in the British Basketball League, Nurse went 22-28 his first season with the D-League’s Iowa Energy, from 2007-08, while adjusting to a “totally different” playing style and roster “merry-go-round [that] was unlike anything I’ve ever seen.” He flipped that record to 28-22 the following season, won the 2011 league championship, and then was hired to coach the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, the D-League affiliate of the Houston Rockets, then run by Morey. Nurse went 24-26 that first season, before winning the title the next year.
Nurse, though, has been candid about what faces the Sixers this season. They must “earn their way back” into the playoffs, he said on media day. “We’re digging ourselves out of a pretty big hole,” he reiterated following recent practices. When asked before Saturday’s home opener against Charlotte how much pressure he felt entering this season, Nurse said, “Not more than any other time.”
“I’m going into every game trying to win,” Nurse said, “and that’s been going on for 35 years. … That’s really all I think about.”
Even before this impressive start, Nurse could pull optimism from a practice day just before the season opener. When he walked into the Sixers’ facility at 7:30 a.m., the coach said, two players already were watching film in the chairs that line the practice courts. Another was moving through an individual workout.
“It’s not easy to get all that stuff: the work ethic, the togetherness,” Nurse said. “I keep saying I’m happy with it. Am I surprised? A little bit, because it’s not that easy.”
Perhaps those Sixers were mirroring their coach and the way his offseason mood propelled him into 2025-26.
“You go through these [times] as a coach, for sure,” he said. “And you just do all those things I said. You debrief. You regroup. You brush the dust off and get back to work.
“And you let that [ticked]-off-edness fuel you a little bit.”
