DUBAI, 11 AUG (DNA) — Hall of Fame coach Don Nelson, one of basketball’s great innovators whose ideas helped shape the modern NBA, has died at the age of 86. Nelson died peacefully on Sunday surrounded by family, bringing to a close a remarkable life in basketball that stretched across more than six decades as a player, coach and executive.
Across 31 seasons as an NBA head coach between 1976 and 2010, “Nellie” recorded 1,335 regular-season victories with the Milwaukee Bucks, Golden State Warriors, New York Knicks and Dallas Mavericks. He retired in 2010 as the coach with the most wins in NBA history, a record he held until Gregg Popovich surpassed him in 2022.
Nelson remains second on the all-time list. He was named NBA Coach of the Year three times and reached the playoffs 18 times. Before moving to the sidelines, he played 14 NBA seasons from 1962 to 1976 and won five championships with the Boston Celtics. Yet for all those achievements, Nelson never reached the NBA Finals as a head coach.
His legacy instead can be found in something bigger: the way basketball is played today. Long before “small ball” and positionless basketball became part of the NBA vocabulary, Nelson was experimenting with unconventional lineups and challenging traditional ideas about how the game should be played.
During his 11 seasons coaching the Milwaukee Bucks from 1976 to 1987, Nelson helped popularize the concept of the “point forward.” In the mid-1980s, he put the ball in the hands of 6-foot-5 forward Paul Pressey, allowing him to initiate the offense and create for teammates in a role traditionally reserved for guards.
The concept became increasingly prominent in the decades that followed, with players such as Scottie Pippen, LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo showing how effective an offense could be when a bigger player was also its primary playmaker. Nelson continued experimenting after taking over Golden State in 1988.
From 1989 to 1991, his high-scoring “Run TMC” trio of Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond and Chris Mullin became one of the league’s most entertaining offensive units, playing at a pace that suited Nelson’s preference for smaller and more versatile lineups.
He even encouraged 7-foot-7 center Manute Bol to shoot from 3-point range during the early 1990s, when centers operating on the perimeter was still highly unusual. Today, forwards regularly run offenses, centers shoot from long range and coaches sacrifice size for shooting, speed and versatility.
Nelson was exploring those possibilities more than three decades ago. Golden State coach Steve Kerr described him as a “true innovator” following his death. “He consistently challenged conventional thinking, experimented with different lineups and styles of play and saw possibilities in the game that others often did not,” Kerr said.
“So much of what is now commonplace in the modern NBA can be traced back to the way Nellie approached the game.” In the 1998 NBA Draft, Dallas acquired the 20-year-old German in a draft-night trade. The Mavericks also acquired Canadian point guard Steve Nash that summer, bringing together two players who would become future NBA MVPs.
At 7 feet tall, Nowitzki did not resemble a traditional NBA big man of the late 1990s. He could shoot from the perimeter, handle the ball and operate in areas of the court usually occupied by guards and smaller forwards. — DNA
