They came to Dallas to say goodbye to Don Nelson, and the room told you what he meant to this sport. The Don Nelson memorial service pulled in greats from all over the league to honor the Hall of Fame coach, who died at 86. Dirk Nowitzki wrote that Nelson was "one of a kind." Rick Carlisle praised the innovation. Both of them, in their own way, were saying the same thing: the game we watch now was partly his idea.
Start with the player, because people forget that part. Nelson won five championships in a Celtics uniform in the 1960s and 70s, and his number 19 hangs in the Boston rafters. That would be a career. For him it was the warmup act.
Then came the coaching, and the tinkering, and the refusal to run anybody else's offense. In Milwaukee he handed the ball to a forward and told him to bring it up the floor, and the point forward stopped being a curiosity and became a position. In Golden State he ran lineups that had no business working, small and fast and allergic to the idea that you needed a traditional center to be taken seriously. They called it Nellie Ball like it was a novelty. Now it is just called basketball. He was named Coach of the Year three times, piled up more than 1,300 regular season wins, and went into the Hall of Fame in 2012.
His Dallas chapter is why the service belonged here. Nelson had the Mavericks in the years a skinny German kid was learning what he was going to become, and Nowitzki's words carried the weight of a guy remembering who believed in him early.
checked the almanac: in 2007 nelson's eighth-seeded warriors knocked off the 67-win mavericks, the franchise he had helped build, the first 8 over 1 in a best-of-seven. only he could have written that one.
What comes next is the part he would have liked least and earned most. Every night, somebody plays five out with a forward initiating and a switch-everything defense behind it, and nobody credits anybody. That is the real monument. Not a plaque. A style of play that outlived its author.
