Cool, So let's move out of the CBA. I have some general NBA questions too. Number One, I need to know what's going on in Toronto because I I have not seen someone go from beloved to a hot seat to I need to take time to reflect. It's been a decade and maybe I don't want to coach here anymore. What's what's your take on how this is all got to this place with Nick Nurse and his future around the Raptors.
Yeah, this is not any sourced reporting, but it's a you know, gut gut feel on this is he's gone, Like I don't you don't get to all this point with all that noise, and then you with like five or six games left in your season, you're like, hey, I know we're getting ready to go into the most important parts of our season in the playing tournament, maybe playoffs, but let me just address this with you guys now,
because I don't want to do it again. Like that could have been done, you know, before the last game of the year. You could have done it. You could have done it before your last postseason game, whatever it is. And I think that was a you know, hey, we're trying to do something here, over the next few weeks. So let's just run with what we got. But I think it's pretty clear that that's headed for divorce and
it's gonna go a different way. The whole I'm gonna take weeks, and that might be turned into I'm gonna take days because I have another job offer ready for me,
and here we go. Because like him or not, and I think some of his antics are a little tiresome, but Nick Nurse is a very very good coach, and I think there's a handful of teams out there that are gonna say, all right, hey, this is a guy, whether it's lift us into title contention because we're already a pretty good team, or we're not very good and we want to be good. Let's get him in here to kind of move us forward. He's gonna have very good opportunities coming his way.
If because there's been a lot of rumors about him maybe being linked to Houston, if he's already getting players like ogn and Obi and Pascal Siakam to tune him out, which is what the reporting is. In my opinion, Keith, and I'd love to hear yours. There's no way he would want to be a part of a rebuild with that sort of roster, right.
Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, we were already hearing some of the things there were you know, port Steven Silas is out there. They're telling us openly like
these guys don't listen. I tell them what to do, and then they don't run the plays, they don't do this other stuff, and it's like, yeah, I think that probably my guess would be if we see Nick Nurse headed to Houston, we're gonna see Houston turning their fifty million into cap space and we're signing some veterans, we're trading some of these kids in packages, and we're turning this thing very quickly into where where we're going forward
with this. I also don't get the sense that Houston's ownership is let's say, the most patient in the world. They gets all right, we did this kind of rebuild thing for a couple of years. Now let's be good again. So I think that could be part of if that all comes together, like we're hearing some of the rumors, I think you might see that turn into let's push this thing forward very very quickly.
Another rebuilding team that has questions around it's coaching. Rumors are that Pop doesn't know if he's coming back in San Antonio. He's not going to make a decision until he finds out whether they're getting Victor WOMPI gamma? Is that? Is that kind of the long and the short of it.
I kind of feel like it might be right. I think he's kind of looking at and saying, hey, you're going to deliver me a you know, not that they're the same kind of player, but give me another Tim Duncan. I'm here. I'll be here next year. If it's you know, we slipped in the lottery and we're getting you know, the third pick or whatever. That guy's probably pretty good. But I'm kind of good. I've I've done this. I think, well we I kind of I don't think Pop's going
to be the kind of guy necessarily. I know some people have said like he's going to retire and then if you see him again, it's gonna because you're part of his inner circle and you're at one of his wine dinners. I don't know if that's gonna be how it goes. I remember different sport, but kind of similar type thing. I remember hearing Bobby Bowden Joe Paturno talked for years about, Hey, if I'm not a football coach,
what am I right? And at this point in my life, this is what kind of keeps me going, gets me up every day, is to do this. So I kind of wonder if Pop's like, hey, if I'm not in basketball, and I think it's been Forgotton because he's been coaching for so long, came out of the front office, and he came out of the front office because it was hey, we built a mess of a team. I should be the one who has to deal with this. And then
they you know, lottery odds as the Celtics guy. I remember quite well we were supposed to get Tim Duncan and Keith van Horn with Rick Patino and ended up with Chauncey Billups and Ron Mercer instead. I think Pop might be like, hey, i can go back and do some work in the front office again, and I'll still be around and kind of doing my thing. And I think, you know, a handful of his kind of people who presume maybe to be his successors, they've kind of moved on,
gone on because he just keeps doing it. But it wouldn't surprise me if they get one min Yama if he's right back on the bench again kind of Hey, I'm gonna do my thing and waiting it out until the absolute right. Personally, he feels like I'm ready to hand this off to is available.
In the beginning of the season, I told somebody who works for the front office of the Spurs. I said, you know, it's it's such a young, fresh team. The way that they're running the offense feels so different. It's almost like you forget sometimes that it's Pop running the show. And their response to me was, we never forget. We know every day who's running the show. Is the question, I guess is like, what does that really mean?
Yeah? I think sometimes what that is is, hey, we like he's now instead of the I'm in there every single day grinding with this, he kind of becomes like, hey, I oversee this operation, right, I've got somebody's kind of running the defense, somebody who's kind of running this. And
that's in general how NBA teams kind of work. I think one of the misnomers is that, you know, I think because people know NFL coaches love to talk about I sleep in my office and I get two hours of sleep a night and I'm breaking down film for you know, one hundred hours a week, and it's like, well, why, like, what more did you learn than that one hundred hours that couldn't have learned in forty But I think it's with the NBA coaches then people think like they're heavily involved,
and I think sometimes it's they've they've their responsibilities, get farmed out to a lot of people and they kind of do their thing, and then what happens with the coach is like, all right, now I collect all that information and I formed that into what we want to do.
And I think for Pop one of the cool things was, I think it was a year ago, we had a chance to talk to him and he was like, you know, I'm kind of re energized by this, like I've got a bunch of kids in here now and where then he said, you know what's cool is we tell them to do something, they go out, they screwed up ten times, and then they finally get it right. It's like, oh man, they got it. Now, Now we can take that, we can build onto that with piece number two, and you
just kind of keep adding to it. And I think he's been a little bit re energized by some of that stuff. But my guess is it's probably a little bit more of a shared responsibility within the organization than it is so much. Hey, Pop's really fully running everything the way it probably was during most of the Duncan Genobili Parker years.
Yeah, And the sense that I got was maybe that they're some of the people there are ready for a regime change to take place too. Yeah.
I kind of wonder if the talent bleed out of the organization with assistant coaches was Man, I can't wait here and be the number two for a million years,
Like I gotta go. Like like if we if we were to talk about college basketball, it was like I remember, for like twenty years, it was black guy's gonna take over for coach k. Yeah, then it was well he's still here, and Neil and then it was you know, Tommy Amaker and Chris Collins and all these guys were and see what house they were all the next guy and they were all they all had to go and we even go other places, and it was like, you know, I kind of wonder if you know the the you know,
will Hardy's and Becky Hammond and Quinn Snyder's and he may Udoka and all the ones who were under pop all had to go other places. And then eventually it was like, all right, now I got my shot at the top job, and I'm kind of running my show. You know, where do we go with this? I think that's probably a little bit of what's going on there.
It maybe it was, man, if you'd gone a year or ago or two years ago, we could have had this coach slid them right into the top spot move forward, and it's just not how it has gone.
Yeah, I do want to get your thoughts on the play in tournament as a whole. Now it's a permanent fixture. Do you think it worked out how you originally thought it would or or is it better or worse?
Better? Way better? I was not I don't want to say it wasn't a fan when they did it for the bubble season. I fully got it because you had to do something. You couldn't come and play a million games in the bubble. That was just not gonna be how it went down. So I was like, all right, I kind of like what they did with with the Bubble year, and then they kind of tweaked and adjusted.
I still part of me kind of wishes and this year is different because these teams are all right there that if hey, if you're the tenth seed but you're twelve games behind the nine seed, thanks for playing, but your season's over. We don't need you involved in a thing, right,
you're you stink and get out. But I think it's this year, right, These teams are all right pretty close to each other within a couple of games, and I think what it's done is it's given the NBA as close as wherever you get to our version of March Madness, right where it's single game elimination kind of there. I know, you lose the first one, you get that second shot
at it. But it's pretty cool to watch those games knowing, hey, this is all on the line, right, It's like we get up you know, a week, you know, a week of game sevens almost you know in the thing. And and that to me is, you know a lot of fun. I think that's a really cool process as we you know, have and able to get that and then it's like, all right, we had that fun, and now we go
into the playoffs. And one of the biggest things I love about the NBA playoffs is the best team usually wins because you're gonna you're tested, right, you've got to win four times in seven games, and you got to do that four times in a row, and that is Hey, it wasn't just one bad shooting night knocked us out, but we still get that taste of the NCAA tournament. One bad shooting night knocked us out through the playing tournament.
So I think it's been a massive success. Not only that, the combination of the play in tournament plus the flat and lottery odds, which means you don't need to be horrendously bad from you know, the season opener to make sure you can get victa win Binyami. You just need to be bad, like kind of naturally bad. Those two things. I mean, we it's only this week, with less than a week to go in the season, that we're starting to get more than the worst four teams in the
league eliminated from playoff contention. That's massive win to me is teams had something to play for, you know, almost all the way to the end of the year, you into last week, and that's where we're starting to eliminate our teams. That's a major, major success and everybody should feel pretty good about.
That awesome stuff. Thank you so much for breaking it all down. That is all the time that we have for this episode of The Heat Check. Massive thanks to my guy Keith Smith. Make sure you give him a follow on Twitter at Keith Smith MBA. Make sure you read his work at spotrack dot com, s p O t r ac dot com. Check back Thursday for an all new episode. Do not forget to pete the feeds for past episodes, interviews and bonus episodes that drop onexpectedly
throughout the week. Sometimes Keith blesses us on BETMGM tonight as well. We post that here and please follow us the heat Check as we're almost to the playoffs, download subscribe, Tell your friends, every single damn one of them, and follow us on social at this heat Check and at trist to crick on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter. Because the heat Check never sleeps, especially we got a new CBA to get ratified,