Sixers beat writer Noah Levick dove into the film from the Sixers’ meetings with the Toronto Raptors last season to see how Philly might look under new head coach Nick Nurse.
Doug West, Fabulous Flournoy, and Toure’ Murry are joining Nick Nurse’s coaching staff, a team official confirmed Wednesday to NBC Sports Philadelphia.
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Keith Pompey first reported West’s hiring.
The Sixers’ website lists Flournoy as a player development/assistant coach and Murry as a player development associate coach. The team has also hired Bobby Jackson and Rico Hines as assistants ahead of Nurse's first season leading the Sixers.
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Flournoy — known as “Fab” — is undoubtedly the standout name. His background is fascinating, too. A New York native, Flournoy became a British Basketball League legend after Nurse recruited him to play for the Birmingham Bullets. Flournoy’s career in England lasted until 2019, when he accepted a position on Nurse’s Raptors staff, and he spent much of that time as a player-coach. Being fastidious about fitness and diet helped Flournoy play into his mid-40s.
Nurse admires Flournoy’s diligence.
“There’s a lot of guys who can fill roles on a coaching staff, but I like the guys that go out there and actually grab a team to coach and work really hard at it,” Nurse said in 2019, per The Toronto Star’s Dave Feschuk. “Fab’s worked really hard asking questions about incorporating things with offense, with teaching shooting, with defense. He’s studied it, put it into practice for his own team he was coaching. We’ve kept in touch over the years, and he’s always had a lot of questions.”
The respect between Nurse and Flournoy is clearly mutual.
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"What I see in Nick as a person is someone who is striving to be a better person, to be a better coach, to be a better man," Flournoy told CBS Sports’ James Herbert in 2018. "On all fronts. In his personal life, in his coaching life, in his career, with his friends. He's always striving to improve himself so he can help others. And that's the beauty of Nick. And that's what I can only talk about. Because that's what I see in him. I see how I want to be."
West served as an assistant coach on the 2012-13 Rio Grande Valley Vipers team that Nurse guided to the D League championship.
A native of Altoona, Pennsylvania, West played four years at Villanova and 12 in the NBA. He competed in the 1992 dunk contest.
West has a variety of coaching experiences, including in high school basketball, as a Villanova assistant, and as Penn State Altoona’s head coach for a season.
Murry was a player on that 2012-13 title-winning Vipers squad. An undrafted guard out of Wichita State, he appeared in 56 NBA games and ended his well-traveled playing career in 2022. Murry had to cut short his stint in Ukraine, fleeing the country after Russia’s invasion.
He told SNY’s Ian Begley last year that he hoped to break into coaching.
“I’m ready,” Murry told SNY. “With my journey, playing the game at a high level, my expertise, I know I want to be a part of the game and I think coaching is the best (route) for me.”
