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Iconic Warriors coach Don Nelson dies at age 86 after more than 1,300 wins

Golden State Warriors head coach Don Nelson talks with guard Stephen Jackson (1) during a break in play during their game against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Tuesday November 11, 2008 in Oakland, Calif.. ( Aric Crabb /Staff)

Don Nelson, who became the NBA’s leader in coaching wins and twice lifted the Warriors from the pits of competitive despair into the playoffs during a luminous half-century pro basketball life, died Sunday. He was 86.

“On Sunday morning our beloved husband, dad, grandfather and great-grandfather Don Nelson peacefully went to be with the Lord, surrounded by his loving family,” a Nelson family statement read. “Throughout his last week, friends and family encircled him with love, sharing the blessings of his friendship and revisiting treasured memories.”

The family did not reveal a cause of death.

Beyond gaudy numbers and a long scroll of awards and achievements, Nelson was one of the most colorful and compelling coaches to grace the Bay Area in any professional sport. A garrulous, iconoclastic and wildly inventive 6-foot-6, 260-pound figure, Nelson was larger than life even beyond his imposing frame.

The man affectionately known as “Nellie” to his players and friends might not have loved every minute of the long ride, which included some controversies and down times along with the successes — but he reveled in most of it.

While his three-decade coaching run didn’t end well recordwise — the Warriors finished just 26-56 in his final season — Nelson did have a small hand in the team’s championship future when he enthusiastically endorsed the drafting of guard Stephen Curry in 2009. He subsequently coached the future All-Star and two-time MVP in his rookie season.

When it finally ended after the 2009-10 season, Nelson voiced few regrets, even though the new Warriors ownership under Joe Lacob had more or less forced him into retirement at age 69.

“I spent 50 years in the NBA,” he said. “Can you imagine doing something that you love the most in the entire world and doing it for your entire life and, besides that, getting a pile of money for it? It’s unbelievable. I’m the luckiest guy in the world. And I know it.”

Golden State Warriors head coach Don Nelson rubs his head during their game against The Utah Jazz in the fourth quarter for Game 4 of the NBA Western Conference semifinals at the Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif. on Sunday, May 13, 2007. The Warriors lost 101-115. (Nhat V. Meyer/Mercury News)

Indeed, Nelson’s immense basketball legacy was as loud and large as the man himself, and he was well traveled, even during his formative years in the Midwest. Nelson was born in Michigan, attended high school in Illinois, went to college at Iowa and got his first NBA coaching job in Wisconsin.

But Nelson made his biggest marks in the NBA on opposite coasts and in Dallas. As a player, he was a fixture on five of the Boston Celtics’ 11 championship teams during the 1960s. Nelson was regarded as one of the best sixth men in league history, and his No. 19 was retired by the Celtics although he never once made the All-Star team and averaged a modest 11.4 points and 5.2 rebounds a game while in Boston.

As it turned out, that would only be the beginning of Nelson’s long, remarkable professional career. What followed the season after he retired as a player, beginning in 1976, was an occasionally frustrating but consistently fascinating 31-year coaching odyssey with four teams that included two stints over 11 seasons with Golden State in different decades.

Nelson ultimately became the winningest NBA coach of all time with 1,335 regular-season victories in 2,398 games, passing previous leader Lenny Wilkens by three wins in his final season with Golden State. He was a three-time NBA Coach of the Year, including twice with the Warriors, and his coaching tree included some high-profile names, most notable among them the San Antonio Spurs’ Gregg Popovich. Popovich eventually surpassed Nelson’s win total and now sits atop the list with 1,390 victories.

Nelson’s son, Donnie, meanwhile, served as the longtime general manager of the Dallas Mavericks and won the 2011 NBA Finals with them.

In short, Nelson accomplished virtually everything a man can accomplish in the NBA with one significant exception — he never won a title as a coach. Often labeled as someone who didn’t know how to utilize big men in what was then a center-dominated league, Nelson could get teams to the playoffs but couldn’t lead them to the ultimate prize. To wit, he got his teams only as far as conference championships three times, twice with Milwaukee and once with Dallas. His Warriors never advanced past the second round.

While Nelson was constantly reminded of falling short of a title as a coach, it never seemed to bother him that much, at least outwardly.

“What I like to do is build things,” Nelson said near the end of his career. “I’ve been proficient at building teams. I got more fun out of going to a bad team. You get smacked around for a while and lose a lot of games at first, but when you get things turned around, it’s very satisfying. I did it in Milwaukee, I did it in Dallas and I really did it twice at Golden State.”

Whether his teams were good or bad, his outspoken and occasionally scowling personality almost always commanded the room. He could be incredibly demanding and critical, which rubbed a few stars like a young Chris Webber the wrong way. But he was also known as one of the most free-spirited and fun-loving coaches in the league, and one of the most beloved by players, fans, fellow coaches and the media. He had an ego to match his physical stature, but he also could be brutally self-deprecating.

“I’m a lot of things,” he said at his Basketball Hall of Fame induction in 2012. “But none of them are great.”

Nelson’s most ardent supporters would beg to differ. Without question, he wasn’t afraid to take on heady challenges and flawed rosters that certainly factored into his never winning a championship. For example, in Oakland, he twice was tasked with daunting repair jobs.

Nelson first came to the Warriors as an executive and minority owner in 1987 under new owners Jim Fitzgerald and Dan Finnane, for whom he’d served as coach for 11 seasons in Milwaukee. But after the team faltered under George Karl that season, Nelson took over as coach.

Almost instantly, the team started to flourish with Nelson’s “small ball” lineup that included two future Hall of Famers, forward Chris Mullin and guard Mitch Richmond, along with scrappy guard Tim Hardaway. The team quickly adopted the nickname Run TMC and was immensely popular, even though the lack of size probably prevented it from being a serious title threat.

Golden State Warriors head coach Don Nelson instructs Stephen Curry (30) during their preseason game against the New Orleans Hornets on Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009 at Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif. Warriors defeat the Hornets 126-92. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)

It didn’t seem to matter to the fans who packed the Coliseum Arena. Among the idiosyncrasies of those early Nelson teams were bullish Lithuanian guard Sarunas Marciulionis, one of the first Eastern Bloc players to play in the NBA, and 7-foot-7 Sudanese center Manute Bol, who Nelson occasionally positioned at the top of the key and allowed to cast 3-point shots. Another colorful character on Nelson’s first teams was Tom Tolbert, a reserve “whipping boy” who later became one of the Bay Area’s top sports radio personalities.

It was a free-wheeling, fun bunch. Mullin said Nelson was something of a mad scientist in concocting such a mix, but he also really knew what he was doing.

Alas, several developments served to undermine Nelson’s first tour of service with Golden State. After the Warriors had been upset in the first round of the 1992 playoffs by Seattle despite a 55-27 record, the coach shook up the roster in an effort to take the next step toward a title. He traded Richmond on the eve of the 1992-93 season to the Sacramento Kings for forward Billy Owens, a versatile player but one who lacked Richmond’s offensive prowess. It was a swap Nelson later said was a terrible mistake.

The team slumped to 34-48 that season but then got the top pick in the NBA lottery, wherein they made a draft-day trade for Webber, the highly touted University of Michigan forward. Webber seemed the perfect fit for Golden State and Nelson, and a bigger, more athletic Warriors team seemed to have a more formidable Big Three in Webber, Owens and second-year guard Latrell Sprewell, with Mullin still on hand as well.

But despite a 50-win first season together (and a quick three-game elimination from the playoffs), Webber and Nelson sparred on and off the court, and the impasse was so severe that inexperienced new owner Chris Cohan approved a deal that sent the talented big man to Washington for Tom Gugliotta and three future first-round picks the next fall.

It was a squabble both player and coach deeply lamented. Their relationship came full circle when Webber signed as a free agent in January of 2008 and played the final nine games of his career for the Warriors with Nelson at the helm. Secretly, they’d spent nearly a decade trying to patch things up via telephone or when they crossed paths. One extended phone chat turned out to be particularly meaningful.

“If we had that kind of conversation a long time ago, I’d still be a Warrior,” Webber said at the time. “If we would have both stayed, I’ll say that we would have won a championship. He would have made me one of the greatest players in the game.”

Nelson, meanwhile, confessed he was as culpable as his 20-year-old star in the relationship blow-up.

Golden State Warriors head coach Don Nelson shares his feelings with an NBA referee as his team trails the San Antonio Spurs in the 3rd quarter of their game on Monday, March 26, 2007 at the Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Contra Costa Times)

“I was the adult in that situation,” he said. “I should have reacted differently.”

Instead, the controversial trade led to Nelson’s own departure from the Warriors only a few months later after the team got off to a miserable 14-31 start in 1994-95. The fallout sent the franchise into a 12-year competitive tailspin with no winning seasons and no playoffs until Nelson was rehired in 2006 by his former star-turned-general manager, Mullin.

Nelson immediately hit the ground running with a ragtag group of talented but edgy veterans that had been expelled by teams elsewhere, notably guard Baron Davis, swingman Stephen Jackson, forwards Al Harrington and Matt Barnes, along with a young scoring phenom in his second season named Monta Ellis.

After a slow start, the 2006-2007 team found its groove late in the season under the collective motto of “We Believe” and miraculously scraped into the playoffs as the eighth Western Conference seed. They figured to be thoroughly dismantled by the top-seeded 67-15 Dallas Mavericks, a franchise Nelson had departed of his own accord as both coach and general manager in 2005 when that club failed to re-sign star guard Steve Nash.

Against his old team and a former player he had nurtured to superstar status, Dirk Nowitzki, Nelson engineered what may have been his greatest coaching feat, designing a new small-ball attack that befuddled the heavily favored Mavs. The Warriors stole the first game of the series in Dallas and then held serve in their own euphoric and incredibly loud building in Oakland. They won the series in six games, and many experts still believe it is the biggest and most dramatic upset in NBA playoff history.

The Warriors were subsequently knocked off in five games in the next round by Utah, but it hardly mattered. Nelson had resurrected the franchise once again, and he reveled in his triumphant return to the East Bay.

“This is a pretty special place to be right now,” he said following the monumental victory over Dallas.

The team actually was better in the regular season the following year, finishing 48-34, but it missed the playoffs by a game. The “We Believe” team roster was subsequently broken up, and Nelson’s final two seasons were rough as the franchise struggled to find a new identity with younger players. Mullin, too, was not rehired after his contract expired at the end of the 2008-09 season.

The old coach resigned a year and a half later, shortly before the 2010 season, as new owners Lacob and Peter Guber pursued a younger approach. Without much doubt, Nelson was ready to go, even though he still had a year left on his Warriors contract.

“I was pretty well fried by that time,” he said in a 2018 New York Times interview.

Always free-spirited, Nelson happily retired to his home in Maui and made only occasional visits back to the mainland. Survived by his wife, Joy, he spent his final years smoking cigars, reveling in Hawaiian sunsets and playing poker with some of his celebrity neighbors, most notably country music legend Willie Nelson and actor Woody Harrelson. He grew his hair long and even dabbled in marijuana growing.

Oakland, CA October 20 - Assistant coach Gregg Popovich, Paul Pressey, and Don Nelson. (Nick Lammers / Daily Review Staff Archives)

Oakland, CA October 20 – Assistant coach Gregg Popovich, Paul Pressey, and Don Nelson. (Nick Lammers / Daily Review Staff Archives)

Oakland, CA November 10, 1993 - Huey Lewis, left, and Warriors coach Don Nelson share a laugh at the home opener after Huey and his band The News sang the national anthem. (Nick Lammers / Oakland Tribune Staff Archives)

Oakland, CA November 10, 1993 – Huey Lewis, left, and Warriors coach Don Nelson share a laugh at the home opener after Huey and his band The News sang the national anthem. (Nick Lammers / Oakland Tribune Staff Archives)

Warriors head coach Don Nelson throws up his hands after being called for a technical foul during their game against the Memphis Grizzlies on Monday March 30, 2009 in Oakland, California. Memphis beat the Warriors by a score of 114-109.( Aric Crabb /Staff)

Carl Steward, the author of this obituary, covered Bay Area sports for 42 years. He died on March 6 when his four-year battle with cancer was over at the age of 72.