Don Nelson Is Gone at 86, and This Region Never Properly Thanked Him

He died Sunday morning surrounded by his family. He gave us Run TMC, We Believe and the man who changed basketball, and half the country still talks about him like he was a gimmick.

Don Nelson died on Sunday morning, 9 August, at 86 years old, three weeks or so after a stroke, with his family around him. And the first thing that happened, predictably, was that the national obituaries reached for the word quirky. Quirky. The man spent thirty-one years telling the National Basketball Association exactly what basketball was going to look like in 2026, everybody laughed at him for most of it, and now that every team in the league plays his way he gets quirky.

He wasn't quirky. He was right. He was right two decades early, which in this sport is the same thing as being wrong, right up until it isn't.

Here's the part people out of town never understood. Nellie was the closest thing basketball has ever had to Kyle Shanahan, and he was doing it before Kyle Shanahan was born. Shanahan came into the world in December 1979. Don Nelson had already been an NBA head coach for three years by then. Same brain, different sport: obsessed with the mismatch, obsessed with making you defend something you've never practised defending, willing to burn a conventional roster to the ground to get one advantage on one possession. Shanahan invents a formation so a linebacker has to cover a receiver in space. Nelson invented a lineup so a centre had to guard a guard forty feet from the rim. Same crime. Same joy in committing it.

And, honestly, the same career-long complaint follows both of them around: he never won the big one as a coach. As if that's the whole ledger. As if the league didn't spend the next twenty years copying the homework.

He retired at the top of the wins list. Nelson passed Lenny Wilkens for the most regular-season victories any coach had ever had, and he did it in a Warriors uniform, in April 2010, in Oakland, in front of us. Gregg Popovich has since gone by him and that's fine; Pop would be the first to tell you whose ideas he was borrowing. Nelson finished 1,335-1,063. Thirty-one years. Four franchises. Eighteen playoff teams. He also won five championships as a player for Red Auerbach in Boston, which is the part everyone forgets, and it matters, because everything he did as a coach came out of watching Auerbach refuse to play the game the way the game was being played.

The inventions, for the record. The point forward, that was him, in Milwaukee, with Paul Pressey, because he wanted his best passer bringing the ball up and his best passer happened to be six-foot-five and playing the wrong position. Small ball, positionless basketball, five men who can all handle it and none of whom can rebound, that was him, and every single team in this league runs some version of it now. Hunting the slowest defender on the floor every trip down: him. Hack-a-Shaq: also him, and yes, we're all still annoyed about that one, but it was a legal solution to an unsolvable problem and he was the only person willing to look ridiculous doing it. He drafted Dirk Nowitzki out of a German league nobody was scouting and then spent seven years proving a seven-footer should shoot threes.

He never once cared what it looked like. That's the whole man.

Now the Bay Area part, which is the part that actually hurts. Nelson took over here in 1988, when the Warriors were a punchline, and within two years he built the most purely enjoyable basketball team this region has ever had that didn't win anything. Run TMC. Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond, Chris Mullin. Named after a rap group, played like one. In 1990-91 all three of them averaged over twenty points a night and the Warriors ran a 55-win San Antonio team with David Robinson on it out of the playoffs as a seven seed. They were undersized, they couldn't rebound, they didn't care, and neither did we, because they scored 120 and you couldn't look away for a single possession.

It lasted two seasons. Two. Then Nelson, wearing the general manager's hat as well as the coach's, traded Mitch Richmond for Billy Owens in November 1991, and if you were alive in the East Bay for that you haven't forgiven it and you never will. It was the correct basketball instinct, he wanted size, he wanted the roster to make sense, and it was still one of the worst things anybody has ever done to this fanbase. Then Chris Webber, Rookie of the Year, and a feud so ugly it cost us both of them inside eighteen months. Nellie was gone by 1995 and this franchise didn't see the playoffs again for twelve years.

Which brings us to the greatest night any of us ever had in that building before the titles. He came back in 2006 and the 2007 team, 42-40, eighth seed, sneaked in on the last day, drew 67-win Dallas in the first round. His old team. His old MVP. And he took them apart in six games with Baron Davis, Stephen Jackson, Jason Richardson, Matt Barnes and Al Harrington playing a style Dallas had no answer for, because the man who had built Dallas was standing on the other bench redesigning basketball in real time to beat them. First eight seed ever to knock out a one seed in a best-of-seven opening round. We Believe. Oracle came off its foundations. He ended the drought he had started, which is the most Don Nelson sentence ever written.

And then, at the very end, the rookie thing. Nelson famously couldn't stand playing rookies. It was one of his hard rules for thirty years, rookies don't know anything, rookies lose you games, sit down. Then in 2009 the Warriors drafted a skinny kid out of Davidson seventh overall, and the 69-year-old man who didn't play rookies handed Stephen Curry the ball and told him to go.

Seventeen and a half points, nearly six assists, 166 threes as a rookie, in an offence with no rules and no guardrails, at 21 years old, on a bad team, with total permission to fail. That was Nelson's last season on any bench. Think about what that green light did. Curry has never been shy about it, he called Nellie his first coach in the league, one of the greatest minds the game has had, a man who pushed the way it was played, and he said Nellie Ball was a real thing.

It was a real thing. The whole sport plays it now. Every team that spreads the floor with five shooters and hunts the slow guy in the pick-and-roll is running an offence a man in Hawaii sketched out on a napkin thirty-five years ago while everyone told him he was a novelty act.

He spent his last years in Maui, growing things, playing cards, staying about as far away from the NBA news cycle as a person can get, and last year the league finally gave him the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award, which was nice, and late, and small compared to what he actually did.

We aren't going to pretend he was a saint here. He was stubborn, he ran off players we loved, he made trades that still make our chest tight, and he couldn't get out of the second round in thirty-one years of trying. All true. He's also the reason the Warriors were ever worth watching between 1975 and 2007, he's the reason the greatest shooter who has ever lived was allowed to be himself as a 21-year-old, and he's the reason your favourite team's offence looks the way it does tonight.

The Bay Area loved Don Nelson. Not politely, not in the way you love a coach who got results, we loved him because he was as impatient with boring basketball as we were, and he did something about it. Eighty-six years old, five rings on the shelf, an entire sport rebuilt in his image, and a region full of people who are going to spend this week telling Run TMC stories to anyone who will sit still.

Thanks, Nellie. We were lucky to have you first.

More: the Oracle Arena history, the Warriors' championship history, and where Stephen Curry's records stand now.

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