Don Nelson, five-time NBA Champion as a player and Hall of Fame coach, passed today at the age of 86. From Glenn Rifkin of The New York Times:
His health deteriorated after a stroke about three weeks ago, his granddaughter Christie Nelson Armstrong said.
Nelson spent 31 years as a head coach, leading the Bucks, the Golden State Warriors and the Dallas Mavericks to the upper echelons of the N.B.A. with a total of 1,335 wins. He was named N.B.A. Coach of the Year three times.
Nelson was pivotal to evolving
NBA basketball into a faster, more positionless game:
Nelson, who added general manager to his title the following season with Milwaukee, used an unorthodox coaching style that became known as “Nellie Ball” to put together a Hall of Fame résumé during his 31 seasons. Nellie Ball proved to be ahead of its time, utilizing smaller, more athletic players to fuel a fast-paced offense that prioritized creating mismatches through speed. It was a philosophy that was adopted across the league long after he retired.
The Blazers only matched up with Nellie once in the playoffs during his 34-year coaching career: The 2003 Playoffs where his Mavs blew a 3-0 lead but held off Portland late in Game 7 to prevent the full comeback:
Nelson also famously argued while coaching his very last game with the Golden State Warriors (against the Blazers) that he ought to be able to keep Devean George in the game after he fouled out because every other player on the bench was injured. Due to the officials’ interpretation of the applicable rule, Nelson was asked to trot out those players until they were deemed to have been injured while playing:
After letting three players onto the court before removing them, George re-entered the game, Steph Curry played all 48 minutes, set a then-career high with 42 points, and the Warriors went on to get the win. Unreal stuff.
Hat tip to our own Timmay for both of the previous two points.
Nelson spent his later years in Hawai’i, growing medical cannabis and playing poker. From a must-read piece by Joseph Bian-Kahn of The Believer:
In his poker room that morning, Nellie told me that when he landed his first coaching job, he gathered the team and explained that he was just going to do exactly what Auerbach and the Celtics did: He didn’t know anything else about coaching and he knew it worked. So I asked if Auerbach’s approach had shaped how Nellie interacted with his players as well.
“I don’t think you really change your personality that much as you go along in life. I mean, I think I’m pretty much the same guy now that I was when I started coaching and playing,” the octogenarian said. To his right there were photographs of him with a young Nowitzki and Steve Nash, and of him and Willie Nelson flipping off the camera. To his left was a life-size statue of a butler with a sign around its neck that read TAKING A 420 BREAK. BE RIGHT BACK… IF I DON’T PASS OUT.
“You kind of have to be who you are,” Nellie continued. “If you try to change, you f*** it up, I’d imagine.”
