Six Bullets

In his autobiography, Rapture, Nick Nurse writes a whole chapter on the experience of being promoted to his first NBA head coaching gig with the Toronto Raptors.

Nurse was a long-time assistant coach with the team, and had been a head coach at every other level of basketball — from college to Europe to the D-League.

“I was pretty calm as the season started, even in our first game. Being the head coach was totally comfortable. It’s what I had been most of my career,” Nurse writes.

His skill at the head coaching position comes across in the subtleties that he is able to write about in the chapter. They also showed themselves in the fact that, in his first year, the Raptors won the NBA championship.

Tucked away in the back of the chapter, as if an afterthought, is one of the most interesting passages in the entire book:

“I told myself when I first got the job that I would have six bullets to fire during the season, just six times that I would allow myself—in the midst of a lacklustre practice, after a particularly sloppy game, or during a losing streak—to really rip into the team.”

Six bullets.

Over the course of a nine-month season.

That’s one bullet every six weeks to address lacklustre effort, sloppiness, cultural standards or interrupting a pattern of poor performance.

“I didn’t keep close track of my six bullets,” Nurse admits, “but I’m fairly sure that I never used them all.”

(Interestingly, West Coast Eagles premiership coach Adam Simpson recently made a similar assessment that, even with the modern-era athlete, coaches have six bullets per season).

I wanted to write about this idea because coaches seem stuck between two modes:

1) no bullets — particularly for fear of being labelled ‘transactional’

2) only bullets — because they can’t think of another way to drive performance

In my mind, each of these two modes lack skill. If your players sense you have no bullets, they’re going to take liberties in areas that are going to be detrimental to your ability to sustain performance. And if they sense that all you’ve got are bullets, you’re going to exhaust them in short order.

As Nurse notes, “There’s a cliché about a coach losing the locker room. It’s a real thing. It can happen if you just chew on their asses from day one and never let up. At a certain point, players will feel like they’ve heard enough and just stop listening.”

Whichever camp you’re in, the six bullets philosophy creates an interesting thought experiment that can help you reach new levels of awareness, and addition craft skills:

• If you use no bullets: if you were to use 2-3 bullets, make a list of the situations in which direct communication could help you drive standards and performance.

• If you use only bullets: if limited to one bullet every six weeks, make a list of the situations you could use different communication to drive standards and performance.

Either way, coming towards the middle of the ‘bullet spectrum’ allows you to expand the repertoire of tools available to you.

Because craft is about being able to use a wide range of tools, in a wide range of ways, with a high level of skill. It’s an expansion of your capability, not a limitation of it.

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If you’re interested in working with me to rapidly accelerate your coaching craft, the first step is to get in touch!

You can reply to this email, or head to codyroyle.com to learn more about my approach.