There are coaches who win titles and coaches who change the game. Don Nelson belonged to the latter category, which is probably both the greatest injustice and the highest compliment that can be paid to him. He passed away Sunday morning at age 86, surrounded by family, according to a statement confirmed by the Golden State Warriors.
He leaves behind 1,335 regular season victories, 31 seasons on an NBA sideline, and three Coach of the Year awards. And also without ever stepping foot in the Finals as a head coach. The basketball being played today in Denver, Belgrade, or the Palau is in large measure his. The championship ring he never won is being worn by others.
The Sixth Man Who Learned From Auerbach
Before he was a coach, he was a player—and a good one. Born in Muskegon, Michigan, in 1940, he made his living for fourteen seasons as a versatile small forward, eleven of them with the Boston Celtics, with whom he won five championships between 1966 and 1976 in a role he himself turned into a profession: the sixth man. Boston retired his number 19 jersey in 1978.
That school left its mark. Nelson himself explained years later that the idea of breaking away from the center-dominated basketball of the seventies and betting on speed and the fast break was born from what he had seen and experienced under Red Auerbach's orders.
Nellie Ball: The Heresy That Is Now Doctrine
In 1976 he sat on a bench for the first time, with the Milwaukee Bucks, and there he began committing the heresies that would make him immortal. He put the ball in the hands of Paul Pressey, a 6'5" small forward, and inadvertently created a new position: the point forward. Pressey's assists skyrocketed from 3.1 to 6.8 per game, and from that experiment was born the idea that height does not dictate function.
The rest is a list of intuitions that at the time seemed like madness. Small lineups, breakneck pace, four-man wings, centers shooting three-pointers. In Golden State he even put Manute Bol, 7'7", to launch three-pointers. All of that, which sounded like eccentricity, eventually had its own name—Nellie Ball—and later a more generic one: small ball. In other words, modern NBA basketball. And, by extension, much of today's EuroLeague.
He also invented, along the way, the most unpleasant weapon in the arsenal: the Hack-a-Shaq, the intentional foul on a poor free throw shooter. Nelson was not the first to think of it, but he was the one who turned it into a system.
The First to Look at Europe Seriously
This is where his figure speaks especially to the European fan. When the NBA still saw Old Continent basketball as a curiosity, Nelson was already crossing the Atlantic. He signed Sarunas Marciulionis, the first Soviet player in the league, and made him a key piece of his Golden State team. With Dallas he selected Wang Zhizhi, the first Chinese player to reach the NBA.
And above all there was 1998. Nelson and his son Donnie traveled to Würzburg to meet an 18-year-old kid named Dirk Nowitzki, hid him for weeks so no rival could see him train, and took him in the draft. Nowitzki's father told him then that he would become his American father. Nowitzki said goodbye to the coach with a phrase that sums it all up: he doesn't believe his career would have been what it was without Nelson as his first coach.
Before leaving, in his second stint in Oakland, he still had time to make another prophecy: the selection of Stephen Curry in 2009.
The We Believe and the Championship Curse
His coaching résumé is full of memorable teams that never made it to the end. The Run TMC of Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond, and Chris Mullin. The Mavericks of Nowitzki and Steve Nash. And above all, the 2007 We Believe: an eighth-seeded Warriors team that eliminated a 67-win Dallas squad—his squad, the one he had built—in the first round in the greatest upset ever remembered in NBA playoffs.
Eighteen playoff appearances in 31 seasons, three conference finals with Milwaukee, one with Dallas. No Finals. He was the coach with the most wins in history until Gregg Popovich surpassed him in March 2022.
He retired in 2010, moved to Maui, and spent the last fifteen years there, away from the spotlight, with the quiet satisfaction of someone who knew his way of seeing the game would ultimately prevail. The NBA he left was nothing like the one he found. It looked like what he had imagined.