Don Nelson Followed His Bliss And Changed Basketball

The notice from Don Nelson’s family announcing his death on Sunday at the age of 86 said he “peacefully went to be with the Lord, surrounded by his loving family.” This immediately convinces us that the deity in question here likes uptempo basketball, beer, blunts, and cards, and who wouldn’t want a final judge who leans into those pastimes?

Every Nelson obit, including this one, will note that he was the second-winningest coach in NBA history—1,335 wins, not including 75 playoff victories. That is maybe the 17th most interesting thing about him. He was the iconoclast’s iconoclast, devoted not just to winning basketball games but to finding ways to win them in the manner of his choosing. The manner he chose favored teams that were improbably fast and impossibly small, and he used it to take bad teams and swiftly make them infuriatingly good. He irked his bosses and enraged his superiors everywhere he went; he befriended players and took money from sportswriters unwise enough to sit at his poker table. He took three different teams to the playoffs as seventh or eighth seeds and won the first-round series, still the only coach to do so, and he also coached a team to 48 wins and missed the playoffs. He was in short the single liveliest underdog in the field wherever that field happened to be. He is almost certainly the only coach to have a distinct playing style named for him—Nellie Ball, by far the least creative thing about it—probably because nobody else had dared to try it.

They do now, though. Big men at the arc, three- and four-guard sets, treating the shot clock like a stopwatch that should never expire—Nelson was into all that decades ago, and while he might have been an old fud compared to some of today’s hoops accelerationists, none of those teams would have even dared be who they are now if he hadn’t done it back in the long ago.