Enjoyed reading Nick Nurse's journey through professional basketball! As a big Raptors fan, I enjoyed a solid read about the head coach who led the team to the championship. Full of interesting anecdotes.

This was an interesting book from a popular NBA head coach. All of Canada was euphoric in 2019 as the Toronto Raptors won the NBA championship under rookie head coach Nick Nurse. This is a great book for someone who aspires to coach either in the NBA or in other leagues. It was interesting to see how personable Nurse is and how his players respond to him. It was great to get some insight into how Nurse coached the team’s superstar Kawhi Leonard and how he won the Raptor’s players over to buy into his coaching style. I think this is a great book for any Raptors fan and would be a great Christmas present for the basketball lover in your life.

It's been an interesting experience reading this memoir at the cusp of the 2020-2021 NBA season. So much has changed about our team, the Toronto Raptors, since this book was written; we've bid farewell to several key players (Kawhi and Danny from last season, but more recently Serge and Marc), we've recruited a new and wholly unrecognizable roster, we've re-signed some familiar, beloved faces.

This made Nick Nurse's words in this book all the more resonant. I enjoyed tracing his journey from accounting undergraduate to point guard/head coach for the Derby Rams in England to assistant and finally head coach of the Raptors. His grit is evident in each endeavour, and I think this grit has come to characterize our players, too.

Like he says at the start:
“The point I hope that readers will take from what I’ve written is that it’s not about the dream. It’s about the work.
You put in the time and the sweat for the satisfaction of knowing you’ve thrown yourself into the struggle. And you do it to make sure that if somebody does give you that opportunity you were dreaming about, you’re worthy of it.”

A must-read for any Toronto Raptors fan!

Thank you NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely devoured this memoir! I am a big Raptors fan, so reading this book was so fun and exciting. I loved all of the stories he told about his life and his time coaching in his early years. Highly recommend to Raptors fans!

When people find out I have a sport psychology degree, they often ask something along the lines of why did you go that route? The simple answer is because there is so much going on behind the scenes in the sports world, with both the athletes and the coaches.
Rapture by Nick Nurse, shows yet another side of the sports world and that’s the struggle to become successful, stay successful and deal with the pressures associated. Much like most people chasing a dream, Nurse didn’t become a phenomenon overnight; however I certainly didn’t realize just how much work he put into becoming a head coach. Like most autobiographies the lesson of never giving up is first and foremost; but Nurse includes many other lessons and things to think about within his book. Whether you’re a basketball or sports fan in general or not, Rapture is an insightful and inspiring read.

Many basketball books focus only on the nuts and bolts of the game. Nick Nurse has taken that template and extended it masterfully in Rapture.

Nurse spends plenty of time on wonky basketball topics. He describes the offenses and defenses he's run throughout his career. They're merits and drawbacks are made clear. Nurse also did a great job of giving credit to people whose ideas he adapted throughout his own career. I'd never heard of Darrell Mudra, but by the end of the book, he was a wise, sage like figure whose teachings permeated the entire book. The Xs and Os are simplified for laypersons like me, but coaches should be able to glean some insights. At the very least, they'll get some great book recommendations.

The part of the book I enjoyed the most was Nurse talking about how he leads his teams. He doesn't hold anything back, and speaks candidly about his own failings where applicable. It's a refreshing change of pace from books where everything bad that happens is someone else's fault. Nurse also talks extensively about game situations and how he (and his players), led the Toronto Raptors to a championship. I've been a tangential fan of the team for years, but I'm now a huge fan of Kyle Lowry, Kawhi Leonard, Fred VanVleet and Pascal Siakam. These guys were the heart and would of that team and made the championship possible.

I recommend this book for all basketball fans. I also think business leaders may be able to get some good insights about team building and accountability.

Nick Nurse achieved a rare feat for a coach in any professional sport – he coached a team to a championship in his first season as a head coach in the league. In his case, it was leading the Toronto Raptors to the 2019 NBA championship in his first season as an NBA head coach. How he got to that point and all the adventures he had on his way to Toronto is told in this fun-to-read memoir.

Nurse tells how many different countries and teams he has coached in the title and he has entertaining stories to tell about each one. Some of the better ones are about the team he coached in England where in order to keep his job and team together, he had to become the owner as well. He even coached Dennis Rodman for two games in that country.

Unlike some other well-known teams and leagues in Europe and Asia, many teams in England live on a thread and can fold in a moment’s notice. Despite all of this, Nurse shares his love for his time there and other countries as well. When he decided to return to the United States, he found employment in the NBA D-League (now called the G-League) with a new team called the Iowa Energy.

Not only was Nurse excited to coach in his home state, but with a new team, he was able to showcase some of his more innovative coaching ideas. Most prominent among those is his emphasis on proper shooting technique in which he uses a specially marked ball he calls the Nurse Pill. Between that and some innovative offensive plays, he enjoyed success in the D-League in both Iowa and later in the Rio Grande Valley.

When Nurse moved up to become an assistant coach in Toronto under Dwayne Casey and then head coach after Casey was fired after the 2018 playoffs, he took what he had learned coaching for all those teams and applied them to the Raptors. What was especially interesting was his manner in which he communicated and related to his players. He is quite in tune to the mindset of an NBA player and he displays that consistently during the chapters on his time with the Raptors. These are the sections in the book that can most easily be used by readers in their day-to-day lives, no matter what their profession or work entails. One doesn’t have to be a basketball coach or fan to not only enjoy this book but to also get some valuable advice.

I wish to thank Little, Brown and Company for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Six and a half hours over two readings on one day. That is all the time it took me to devour this book. Full disclosure that I’m a basketball junkie and a Raptors fan but this book by current Raptors head coach Nick Nurse is produced to play to more than just hoopheads.

Nurse has hung his shingle up in more than a few countries and in many different levels of this sport of basketball but as is so well laid out in this memoir, when one has the ability and hunger to pick up little nuggets along the way and make them your own, many times success awaits you. He makes no secret that he has stolen some of his greatest plays or methods of coaching, which is something many of us are fearful admitting in our professional lives. We often conjure up smokescreens to lull people into believing we are the original scriptwriter but Nurse reveals the history behind some of his playcalling and game prep claiming no creativity to most of them. That said, in no way does that detract from who he is as a leader. You can admire past coaches like Phil Jackson (who provides a foreward in this book) and lift some of their ideas but you still have to motivate your team to execute your plan as a whole, something that the Raptors did by winning their first ever NBA championship under Nurse in his first year as head coach.

The beauty of this book, and of his philosophy on coaching, is that the reader can easily apply it to their own life. Any person who heads a team at work, as a community leader, as a parent, even just within a group of friends can lift ideas from Rapture and utilize them as motivational tools for all involved. Nurse unnecessarily makes this point more than a few times in the book which felt a little too much like “are you getting this?” to me. As a longtime reader of leadership books I can say that he nailed everything on the nose so well that even the casual reader would indeed get it without the prompting.

Nonsports fans will still get some great ideas from this book, but if you are a basketball fan you’ll devour this. Note that given the fact that Nurse is still an active head coach you won’t find any dirt within. He played every player and team related reference safely and you can’t blame him for that in today’s NBA player movement environment.

Pick this up and challenge yourself to lead better, listen better, and win.

Thank you to NetGalley and Little, Brown And Company for providing a copy for review.

This interesting bio goes over the career and life of Nick Nurse who started out coaching really on one of the lowest basketball totem poles from small colleges, assistant coaching, overseas, Development league, and eventually an NBA championship team. Nurse is somewhat reminiscent of Phil Jackson, who also wrote the foreword and makes an appearance in the book as Nurse spent a few days in Montana with Jackson. I would recommend this to any NBA or basketball fan as it doesn't go game by game like some sports biographies, but rather goes over an arching career of interesting coach who is pursuing his doctorate & has translated his enjoyment of listening to Thelonious Monk into his coaching style.

This was a great read about Nick Nurse's incredible journey to a Championship with the Toronto Raptors. An unbelievable lesson in hard work, persistence and innovation that could be utilized in sports, coaching or business settings.

The best part of the book is seeing the strategies he innovated in his young career with European teams and Development League teams come back into the championship run proving that if you learn your lessons throughout the process, you can reach the pinnacle.

I love sports biographies so very much and this one did not disappoint. Having roots set in Iowa, it made my heart happy to learn about small town Iowa boy turned into NBA coach legend. The writing of this biography was impressively good. I feel like sometimes I have to lower my expectations when it comes to books written by famous people, but this book more than exceeded those expectations.