Nick Nurse praises Chris Boucher’s reliability on both ends of the floor

Though the Toronto Raptors didn’t come up with the win against the Miami Heat on Monday, head coach Nick Nurse praised Chris Boucher for his team-high 23-point performance and what he’s shown on both ends of the floor in recent games.

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Video Transcript

- Hi, Coach. We have a couple questions for you here. We'll start with Doug.

- Hey, Nick. Tough game. You're only having able to play six guys. You really needed to get a lot out of all of them. And just-- just hard to play that tough for 48 minutes only with such few players?

NICK NURSE: I don't-- I don't know, Doug. I think we played as tough as we could. I think I didn't see anything that was changing. We were battling from start to finish. And you know, other than one small stretch there where they took it out to 9, but we clawed it straight back, that one probably could have went either way. It was a hell of an effort by our guys.

- Did Justin get banged up? He only played nine minutes. And is it just hard to find somebody else from that second group of three, Yuta, the kid point guards, anybody to sort of give you something?

NICK NURSE: Well, again, Doug, I think-- I know that's a lot of minutes for-- for some of those guys. But I did. I felt comfortable. I actually-- I thought I had six guys. I wanted them all out there. I kind of wanted to keep Precious out there more in the fourth quarter, but kind of ran Scottie. And Chris was having a great game, so let him keep going.

I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm looking at the guys we played if I can fault any of them for the way they played tonight. So I'm not saying I needed to try anybody else.

- Yeah, fair. That's fair. Thank you. I appreciate it. Safe trip over to Dallas.

NICK NURSE: Thanks, Doug.

- Next, we'll go to Aaron.

- Hey, Nick. To quickly follow up on Doug's question, is Champagnie injured? Is he OK? Do you have any update on him?

NICK NURSE: He dislocated his finger. Had to come out and get it tended to. But yeah, he was fine to go back in and play.

- OK. Is that as good as you've seen Chris? I know he's played pretty well a lot lately at least since the start of the season. But what did you think of him tonight?

NICK NURSE: No, he was very good. He was very good. He's kind of been giving us the same thing here for a good stretch of games, which is good to see. He's really a problem on the glass at both ends. And he's just battled so hard and keeps a lot of balls alive.

And defensively he's been pretty good too. He's all kinds of match-ups, which you probably wouldn't expect. He's been guarding a lot of guards and things like that, and he's been doing a credible job.

- Glad to see him running the court again. It seems like he's constantly flying in transition more so than a few weeks ago or whatever.

NICK NURSE: Yeah, I think just everybody-- I think our pace in general was good tonight, Aaron. We were really pushing it at them and attacking and took some opportunities in transition.

- Thanks, Nick.

NICK NURSE: Thank you.

- And next, we'll go to Takashi.

- Hello, Coach. Thank you for your time. My question, I would like to ask about Yuta, about another game. And tonight, you obviously didn't play him after giving him some good opportunities to start against very good teams in the last two games. So I think maybe you think he would need some more time to ramp up and get him-- get back to the condition. Is that right?

NICK NURSE: Yeah, that's it, Takashi. He doesn't seem to find his rhythm much yet. Just probably needs some time, a little practice time, and he'll be back in the rotation here soon, I'm sure, definitely.

- OK, thank you so much.

NICK NURSE: Yup, thank you.

- Thanks, Coach. That's all the hands we have for you here.

NICK NURSE: OK, thank you. All right. Thanks.