CBS ranks Toronto Raptors coach Darko Rajakovic among the NBA's worst, but praise for Nick Nurse

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CBS Sports columnist Sam Quinn has ranked the NBA’s head coaches heading into the 2024-25 season and there’s a big difference between the placement of the current Toronto Raptors head coach and his predecessor.

Quinn groups the bench bosses into nine tiers, with Erik Spoelstra of the Miami Heat the Tier 1 choice as “The undisputed king. Spoelstra has won two NBA titles as coach of the Heat and taken the team to the NBA Finals four other times (he also won a title as a Heat assistant under Pat Riley and has been part of gold medal-winning Team USA coaching staffs).

“Every other coach on this list has distinct strengths and weaknesses,” Quinn writes. “If Spoelstra has a weakness, it’s not readily apparent.”

But former Raptors head coach Nick Nurse isn’t far behind Spoelstra in the rankings. In fact, Nurse, who led the Raptors to the 2019 NBA championship, was ranked second overall, in Tier 2 with fellow title winners Rick Carlisle, Steve Kerr and Ty Lue.

The praise for Nurse was massive, with the author writing: “Nurse, at his core, is a problem solver. Whatever you show him on the court, he’s going to have some idea about how to stop it and the results thus far have spoken for themselves. He lost Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green and his Raptors still maintained the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference.

“Joel Embiid played his best basketball under Nurse last season despite winning an MVP under Rivers,” Quinn continued. “He’s lucky (Tom) Thibodeau exists, because his reputation for overusing starters probably doesn’t go quite far enough, but in matters of strategy, Nurse is almost unmatched. Emphasis on almost.”

The newest Raptors leader, Darko Rajakovic, has only one season of experience under his belt in charge of an NBA team (but many others as an assistant in the league or as the head guy in the NBA G League), so is grouped in Tier 9 with four others labelled as: “We don’t know enough.”

Rajakovic was ranked 26th overall, ahead of new Brooklyn Nets and current Canadian national team head coach Jordi Fernandez, Charlotte’s Charles Lee, Washington’s Brian Keefe, and player-turned-podcaster-turned Los Angeles Lakers coach JJ Redick, who was placed at 30, which surely will go over well with usually calm and rational Lakers fans. Quinn does say Redick takes the bottom spot purely based on a lack of experience.

On Rajakovic, he says: “Rajakovic has one tanking season on the job. Check back with me in a year and I’ll have something to say,” which actually seems fair. 

Quinn says in the piece that had Adrian Griffin still been coaching, he would have been ranked last. Griffin was one of Nurse’s right-hand men on the Raptors, including during the championship season, but was ousted extremely quickly by Milwaukee last year after finally getting a chance to lead his own team. Toronto had considered him as Nurse’s replacement.

Coaches were ranked by track record, performance against expectations, points of emphasis (like taking the right shots, being steady defensively), creativity, player development, rotation management and people management.