CAMDEN, N.J. — The Philadelphia 76ers shook up their roster in a big way by trading James Harden to the Los Angeles Clippers. Nick Nurse has done what he can to get the Sixers to play well without Harden. Now, he will have to incorporate new players and fill another gap in the starting lineup.

The Sixers included P.J. Tucker in the Harden trade, along with Filip Petrusev. Philly plugged Harden's spot in the starting five with De'Anthony Melton but now needs someone to take Tucker's spot. Each of the players they got from Los Angeles — K.J. Martin, Robert Covington, Marcus Morris and Nicolas Batum — could be contenders for the spot. But with the trade yet to be completed, they can’t be totally relied upon as options for the Sixers' Thursday game against the Toronto Raptors.

Nurse's time coaching in the G League gave him experience for this. Bringing in the new Sixers should be a walk in the park compared to the constant roster churn he used to deal with.

“I mean, it goes along the lines again of who's there, right? Like, I've been in these situations before in the minor leagues. That happens to you a lot, where you got one team on Tuesday and Thursday, you got four guys called up and moving guys in and out and around,” Nurse said on his approach to coaching in the wake of a huge trade. “So, you know, there's some thought that needs to go into all that, right? And the first thought is, you can't let that try to disrupt things too much. I mean, you just gotta kinda say, ‘Here we are, here's where we are, let's deal with it, let's handle it.’”

“And then you gotta start kind of going down the pecking order of how do you get 'em integrated as quickly as possible? It's usually different timelines for each guy,” the Sixers coach continued. “Gotta do all those kind of things. But the main thing is I'm focused on the guys that were here today and I'm starting to think about some possible different rotations and things like that because we got a game to play in a couple days and we want to play well.”

Nurse spent six seasons as a G League head coach back when it was called the D-League. As a coach of a minor league team, he had to be ready for players to get called up to the NBA and be traded to other teams in the league at a moment's notice. Coaching the Rio Grande Valey Vipers, the Houston Rockets' affiliate, gave him experience working with Morris and Sixers backup guard Patrick Beverley.

Nurse learned to integrate in-season additions during his time as the head coach of the Raptors, too. They traded for Marc Gasol during his first season there and the big man would end up as the starting center on the eventual champions. The Raptors made other moves at the trade deadlines over the years under Nurse. But the Harden trade, which happened after just three games, is a new challenge.

Looking back on his time with the G League, Nurse said that he is grateful and that “there's almost no better training ground to becoming an NBA coach than that league. It's difficult. It's difficult down there.” The hardships he dealt with through those years helped build him into the experienced, effective coach he is now.