'9 or 10 of his looks were really good': Nick Nurse on Fred VanVleet's shooting vs. Celtics

Toronto Raptors coach Nick Nurse discusses Fred VanVleet's shooting slump, how teams are guarding him differently and whether he notices anything off with his mechanics.

Video Transcript

- --guys have had shooting slumps. You come in here, and you turn on the analytics--

NICK NURSE: Heh.

- --you start looking at every little thing.

NICK NURSE: Yeah.

- Are you seeing anything with Fred? Is it all still green? Or is there one aspect of the trinity that is a little off?

NICK NURSE: No, I mean, I think normally, his numbers on his right-left, his straightness are just off the charts. And that is the one that's got a little off-kilter a little bit for him, which it's a bit strange. Because that's one of those things that once you dial that in in your mechanics, that one doesn't leave you very often, right? That one, no matter how tired you are or how deep you're shooting or whatever, you still get it to come off your hand the same way, with some straightness. And that's the one that has got a little bit of a wrinkle for him right now that he's got to get ironed out.

- How do you fix that?

NICK NURSE: Oh, he's just got to work on it a little bit. And we do what you already said. We get in here, and we concentrate on that one aspect. And it usually can change pretty quickly.

- Are teams kind of running him off the line? [INAUDIBLE] trying to get him to [INAUDIBLE] in the paint?

NICK NURSE: Well--

- [? --his ?] numbers are really down.

NICK NURSE: Yeah, I would say that there has been a lot of extra attention towards him today. Probably one of the better examples was Orlando the other night because he was-- we ran numerous sets for him where he was open, you know, like, normally open.

And at some point, either the last screener made a really hard switch out to his body, or the guy who was chasing him, who took a bad route or we picked him off earlier in the play, would race around and again just, like, sprint right to his body. And so things that looked like they were going to be nice catch-and-shoots for him turned into get off the ball things, right? So that definitely was game planned by them and executed really well.

Again, looking at last [? night's, ?] he had just-- again, I think he had 14 shots, I think that's right. And I would say 9 or 10 of them were really good looks. And there was a few that he, again, got hung up in the lane a little bit. But again, even some of those weren't that contested at 8 to 10 feet. And him just figuring out the rhythms of how people are playing him was part of the challenge there.

- Nick, you've kind of talked about this--