Don Nelson enjoyed a five-decade run through the NBA, a career that will be memorialized in Springfield.
Don Nelson would pop open a cold one and hoist himself onto the trainer’s table in the alcove between the Milwaukee Bucks’ dressing room and their showers, the space set aside for NBA medical staffs in shorter supply back in the 1980s.
Time and again, the game long over, his tie loosened and sport coat shed, Nelson would lean back and entertain questions from a local sportswriter whose newspaper was known as a “PM,” an afternoon publication with a luxurious story deadline of about 6 a.m.
Nelson never seemed rushed as he gave what amounted to a masterclass heading toward midnight on the whys and wherefores of NBA basketball.
One night he would explain the intricacies of the league’s illegal defense rules, based on intimate knowledge he gleaned from helping to write those rules with the competition committee. (So what if that was like letting a safecracker choose the bank vault’s combination, it worked for Nellie and his Bucks.)
Another time he might explain his reasons for bringing in old war-horse point guards such as Norm Van Lier, Tiny Archibald or Charlie Criss. Or dissect the wide-equals-tall specialness of Philadelphia rookie Charles Barkley.
“There’s something relative between bulk and height,” Nelson told me in January 1985 about controlling air space for rebounds and put-backs. “It makes [the 6-foot-6] Barkley a 6-foot-10 power forward,” he said.
Nelson, 86, died Sunday in Frisco, Texas. A husband, father, grandfather and NBA legend, he takes with him more know-how and killer stories than a dozen of his peers or rivals combined. He experienced the game at all levels – player, coach, general manager – and did so in the NBA more than all but one other participant.
Among all who played, coached or did both, only fellow Hall of Famer Lenny Wilkens took part in more games than Nelson. Wilkens logged 2,487 games on the sidelines and his 1,077 on the court, with some of those counted twice for his four seasons as a player-coach in Seattle and Portland. Nelson is second all-time with 3,451, based on 1,053 games as a role-playing forward from 1962-1976 and 2,398 in 31 years of coaching the Bucks, Warriors, Knicks and Mavericks.
His teams never reached the Finals, never mind winning a championship. But his 1,335 victories rank second to San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich, he was named Coach of the Year three times (with six more Top 5 finishes), and his teams topped .500 21 times, with 12 seasons of 50+ victories and two topping 60.
He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2012 after being named one of the league’s Top 10 coaches in 1997 when the NBA celebrated its 50th anniversary. And there’s no questioning his winning pedigree given the five rings he earned with the Boston Celtics in nine seasons both with and post-Bill Russell, the franchise’s fabled leader. Nelson’s No. 19 hangs in the rafters at TD Garden.
Oh, here’s one little-known fact about the man almost universally known as “Nellie”: His whole coaching career nearly got pre-empted when he dallied with the notion of becoming … a referee?
Fact check: True. In the offseason of 1976, Nelson had retired as a player and had, by his count, about $10,000 in the bank. With a family to feed – including future Dallas exec Donnie Nelson – the $20,000 he could make as a rookie NBA ref looked good. So with commissioner Walter Kennedy’s blessing, he grabbed a rule book, got himself a whistle and headed to the NBA summer league.
Nelson knew the game and liked the running, but was awfully raw. Calling a foul on Player No. 8 one game, he held up seven fingers to the scorer’s table. In another, his mistaken gesture to signal a team’s timeout got that surprised coach initially slapped with a technical foul.
While undeterred by the learning curve, Nelson did not welcome the idea of being shipped to the Eastern League to hone his craft. In hindsight, it’s amusing, the idea of Nelson joining the ranks of the very guys with whom he’d spend more than three decades beefing and occasionally belly-bumping.
“I thought I was going to be a good one,” Nelson said years later. “Obviously I didn’t have a lot of company.”
Instead, he essentially was thrust into coaching in 1976-77 when the Bucks’ Larry Costello resigned just 18 games after Nelson signed on as the team’s lone assistant. He turned down GM Wayne Embry’s offer three times in a two-day period before relenting.
“I learned my trade out of fear that I wasn’t good enough,” he said. “I couldn’t have gotten very deep that first year because I didn’t know that much.”
Nelson worked magic in Milwaukee, building with a core of players who’d arrived in the franchise-shaking 1975 trade of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The Bucks became one of the NBA’s great undecorated teams, buffeted by the Larry Bird Celtics and the Julius Erving Sixers in the Eastern Conference. They went 3-6 in the playoffs against those rivals from 1981-87, three times beating one but losing to the other in a postseason run.
It was there that Nelson’s mad-scientist reputation began, born from necessity. He searched annually for a franchise center, sifting through aging Bob Lanier, project Alton Lister and journeymen such as Randy Breuer and Paul Mokeski while patching over various flaws. Watching Breuer and Mokeski thwart zone defense prohibitions by linking arms – far on the wing, as if strolling in an Easter parade, to pull opposing bigs from the basket and open space for the Bucks’ scorers – was to see the game get giddily tweaked.
And if Nelson didn’t invent the term “point forward” – Del Harris, Robert Reid and Marques Johnson will fight over credit for that – he at least popularized it in NBA vernacular and deployed it often. First Johnson and then Paul Pressey played there, initiating Milwaukee’s offense.
Away from the court, Nelson’s Midwest roots – born in Michigan, raised in Illinois, schooled at Iowa – made him a natural in southeastern Wisconsin. He was a blue-collar regular at Major Goolsby’s, the sports bar across from the old Milwaukee Arena (called “MECCA” only by non-locals). After practice or shootaround, he reliably could be found there in possession of a burger, a beer and a fistful of quarters to pump into the Ms. Pac-Man console.
Nelson grabbed headlines on and off the court. He became an official neckwear model for a stretch for the Ralph Marlin-brand “fish ties” he wore in games. Commissioner David Stern rebuked him in 1985 for sporting black Converse sneakers on the sideline for comfort, so Nellie avoided a fine by slapping an “X” of athletic tape on each shoe to cover up the logos.
In 1986, Nelson was moved by the letter of a Wisconsin farmer desperate to save his family’s land, so he started “Nellie’s Farm Fund.” He raised $400,000 by driving a tractor around the state for nine days, pulling a wagon with a huge plastic piggy bank he called “Barkley.”
A lightning rod for conflict with multiple bosses, Nelson flamed out in Milwaukee in 1987 and headed off to NBA challenges in Golden State, Dallas, New York and back to Golden State. He went 795-719 with those teams, good for about 63% of his coaching appearances and 60% of his wins.
The brainstorms kept coming, from his frequent use of small ball to sending 7-foot-6 Manute Bol to shoot 3-pointers for two seasons to end the 1980s. Nelson had great players at every stop, from Johnson, Lanier and Sidney Moncrief in Milwaukee and Golden State’s Run-TMC (Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond, Chris Mullin) to teaming Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash in Dallas and getting Baron Davis and, near the end, rookie Steph Curry back in Oakland.
He led that Dallas crew within two victories of the 2003 Finals, falling to the Spurs in the West Finals after a 60-22 season. Resigning in frustration two years later, Nelson scored one of his most satisfying triumphs in 2007 when he steered the Warriors to a first-round upset of the heavily favored Mavericks (67-15).
Don Nelson salutes Gregg Popovich on victories record.
Fourteen months ago in Oklahoma City, before Game 2 of the 2025 Finals, Nelson traveled from his idyllic Maui home to accept the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award, presented annually by the National Basketball Coaches Association. And at age 85, he still showed his cantankerous side, announcing that he was wearing a pair of Luka Dončić’s Jordan Brand shoes to “protest” the star guard’s trade to the Lakers a few months earlier.
Don Nelson was an original to the end, and those late-night postgame tutorials in Milwaukee 40 years ago never will be forgotten.
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Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA since 1980. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on X.
