DALLAS — Less than a month after former Dallas Mavericks coach and general manager Don Nelson passed away on August 9, Dallas is targeting a November 18 matchup with the Golden State Warriors to honor Nelson’s life and legacy.
Fittingly, the game comes against Golden State, where Nelson also coached. Shortly after his death, the Warriors announced that they will wear a “NELLIE” patch on their jerseys this season.
The Life Of Don Nelson
Born May 15, 1940, in Muskegon, Michigan, Nelson enjoyed a rural upbringing. He, his parents and two sisters lived on his grandfather’s farm near Sherrard, Illinois, which had a population of 415 in Nelson’s birth year. There, he attended a school with just seven students across six grades.
As one might expect for a farm boy from a tiny town, Nelson didn’t have many resources when it came to basketball. His first experiences shooting the ball came from using a spokeless bicycle wheel nailed to a shed in the family’s chicken yard.
Under those conditions, Nelson was hardly obsessed with basketball. It wasn’t until the family lost the farm due to collapsing pork prices and moved to nearby Rock Island, Illinois, that a middle-school-aged Nelson fell in love with the game.
He went on to attend Rock Island High School, where he really came into his own. Walking to school, Nelson would stop periodically to shoot baskets when he passed a hoop and would drop by the local YMCA after practice for extra reps.
In his final two years of high school basketball before graduating in 1958, Nelson led Rock Island to a 47-7 record. Despite his team’s success and his 20.2-point average as a senior, Nelson wasn’t recruited heavily, which prompted his father to suggest a future as a watch repairman.
Ultimately, Nelson opted to join the University of Iowa and coach Sharm Scheuerman, a Rock Island graduate.
“The tougher the game got, the tougher Don played,” Scheuerman later said of Nelson. “He always had a lot of savvy. Don did some things you just can’t coach. Some players have the body, but aren’t mentally tough. Others are mentally tough, but don’t have the body. Don had both.”
When Nelson left the Hawkeyes four years later, he was the team’s all-time leading scorer. In three seasons with the varsity (freshmen were prohibited from playing varsity at the time), Nelson averaged 21.1 points and 10.9 rebounds.
Nelson’s college career earned him the 17th selection in the 1962 NBA Draft, where he was taken by the Chicago Zephyrs. After one season in Chicago, the Zephyrs became the Baltimore Bullets and Nelson found himself on a new team: the Los Angeles Lakers.
Los Angeles proved to be nothing more than a pit stop, however, and by 1965, Nelson was a member of the Boston Celtics. There, he found his footing as an NBA player, averaging 11.4 points across 11 seasons with the franchise.
He certainly learned about winning in Boston, contributing to five championship teams. Holding a one-point advantage with under 90 seconds in Game 7 of the 1969 NBA Finals, Nelson knocked down a free-throw line jumper to extend the Celtics’ lead to three and secure the title.
‘Nellie Ball’ And The Legacy of Don Nelson
Uptempo basketball was a staple of Boston’s teams during the 1960s, with center Bill Russell pushing the ball on the break and emphasizing outlet passes to streaking teammates.
“He wanted to speed up the pace and dictate how the game was going to be played. And if there was anybody smart enough to do it, it was him,” Nelson wrote of Celtics coach Red Auerbach in a 2016 Players’ Tribune article. “He was the game’s greatest architect, and the nine championships that he won as a coach were the result of some of the finest coaching in league history.
“As a newly acquired member of the Celtics I learned what Red meant by fast. We might have had the greatest center the game has ever seen in Bill Russell, but we were going to run anyway. If we could beat an opponent down the floor, we were going to do it. Just look back at old clips of us. Bill Russell, even at 6′ 9″, was running the floor like a guard and scoring off easy touches. It was quite extraordinary.”
When Nelson finally got his own head coaching opportunity after Larry Costello resigned from the Milwaukee Bucks midway through the 1977–78 season, he leaned on that knowledge and revolutionized basketball with what would later be tabbed ‘Nellie Ball’.
Positionless play, which is stressed in modern basketball, wouldn’t be where it is if not for Nelson. He famously discarded the idea that a team needed a small guard to run the offense when he let 6-foot-7 Marques Johnson and later 6-foot-5 forward Paul Pressey take the reins for Milwaukee.
The decision to go big created mismatches all over the floor, and with off-ball movement and speed surrounding them, Nelson quietly developed one of the most efficient offenses in the history of basketball. The Bucks subsequently won seven consecutive Central Division championships and Nelson brought home Coach of the Year honors in 1983 and 1985.
When he landed with the Golden State Warriors ahead of the 1988-89 season, he brought his offense with him. Joined by Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond and Chris Mullin, Nelson’s team was dubbed ‘Run TMC’ due to the fast-paced nature of play behind the three stars.
Nelson earned his third and final Coach of the Year award after leading Golden State to a 55-27 record in 1991-92. After making the playoffs in four of his six seasons with the Warriors, he resigned from the team in February 1995. Golden State wouldn’t return to the playoffs until 2006, when none other than Don Nelson was back coaching the team.
Don Nelson In Dallas
After his first stint with Golden State, Nelson coached one unceremonious season for the New York Knicks before finding work as the coach of the Mavericks.
Nelson tallied 339 wins with Dallas during his 1997-2005 stint with the team, trailing only Rick Carlisle in total wins for the franchise. In the 2002-03 season, Nelson led the Mavericks to a 60-22 record, which is tied for the second-most wins in a season in franchise history.
That record also ties a career-best for Nelson, who managed a 60-22 campaign with Milwaukee in 1980-81.
Also serving as the team’s general manager, Nelson helped negotiate a deal to land franchise cornerstone Dirk Nowitzki in the 1998 NBA draft and shortly thereafter traded for Steve Nash. Nash and Nowitzki, of course, led the charge for the Dallas teams of the early 2000s.
Nelson’s coaching philosophy unlocked Nowitzki, using his abilities as a floor-spacer, playmaker and ball-handler to challenge defenses. Under Nelson’s tutelage, Nowitzki became a league MVP and led the Mavericks to their first-ever NBA Championship in 2011.
“Nellie… You didn’t just draft me. You believed in me. You saw things in my game before I ever realized I could do them,” Nowitzki wrote on X after Nelson’s passing. “I’ve said it a million times and I will always say it: I don’t think my career could have turned out how it did without you being my first coach and giving me the freedom to play my game. I can only say THANK YOU. For everything.”
By then, however, Nelson was retired. He returned to the Warriors after stepping down from his position in Dallas during the 2004-05 season, handing the keys over to assistant coach Avery Johnson, who led the team to the 2006 NBA Finals.
Despite leaving the Mavericks himself, Nelson left a bit of his influence in Texas. His son, Donnie, stayed with Dallas as a general manager and was behind the monumental selections of Luka Dončić and Jalen Brunson in the 2018 NBA Draft.
Nelson coached four more years in Golden State before calling it a career after the 2009-10 season.
Don Nelson’s Life After Coaching
At the time of his retirement, Nelson held the record for the most regular-season wins of any coach in NBA history until he was surpassed by Gregg Popovich in 2022. He was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2012. That year, Nelson also completed his coursework to officially become a graduate of Iowa, where he majored in physical education.
‘Nellie Ball’ took on a new life as the NBA embraced run-and-gun offenses more and more in the years since his retirement. Whether watching the Seven Second Or Less offense of the 2000s Phoenix Suns or the spaced-out, small-ball style of the 2010s Houston Rockets (both coached by Mike D’Antoni), Nelson’s influence is palpable.
Towards the end of his life, Nelson returned to a farm. This farm, though, was located in Maui, Hawaii. There, he grew flowers, coffee and cannabis. According to his son, Nelson enjoyed his time in the sun.
“All I can tell you is he’s happy,” Donnie said in 2019. “He’s in Maui, drinking Mai Tais and watching sunsets and whales. Life’s good.”
Don Nelson moved to Frisco in early 2026, reuniting with North Texas before passing away on August 9 at 86 years old.
