During one of the most important moments of the Toronto Raptors' NBA championship season, first-year head coach Nick Nurse went back to his Iowa roots. With the Raptors locked with the Philadelphia 76ers in Game 7 and a trip to the Eastern Conference finals at stake, the Carroll, Iowa, native called up a play he discovered from a DVD he bought in Ames and used a number of times while coaching the then-NBA Development League's Iowa Energy.

And like it did so many times with the Energy, the play worked , this time on an even bigger stage: Toronto star Kawhi Leonard knocked down a buzzer-beating jumper that gave the Raptors a stunning 92-90 win.

The Raptors went on to defeat the Milwaukee Bucks to reach the NBA Finals , where they dispatched the Golden State Warriors in six games to clinch the franchise's first championship .

But those trophy memories may not be in Canadian sports lore without the big play call by Nurse and performed to perfection by Leonard.

“Kawhi’s Game 7 buzzer-beater was the same exact play we used at the Energy — I’ll bet you, 10 times — to either win a game or send a game into overtime,” Nurse said in an interview with the Des Moines Register on Tuesday. “We’d pop Cartier Martin off that thing, and he’d bang that 3-ball (in) or go one-on-one like Kawhi did and make the play on that.

"That’s an old play I stole off a (longtime NBA coach and broadcaster) Hubie Brown DVD I got from Championship Books and Video in Ames, Iowa.”