February 20, 2008, 28 games to go: Just minutes after his Golden State Warriors upset the NBA-champions-to-be Boston Celtics, celebra­tory screams still seem to echo through the arena as head coach Don Nelson tiredly sits his 6-foot, 6-inch frame behind a cluster of micro­phones. While some coaches clam up around cameras, the craggy Nelson, though no longer allowed to bring his ceremonial beer into press chats, fields questions more like he’s tending bar than being filmed by ESPN. He teases his beat reporters like they’re the house regulars and feeds the rest of us cryptic responses—“Oh, that’s for you guys to figure out”—that let us know we’re covering a coach who no longer feels he has anything to prove.

Even with the cocktail-hour attitude, what you don’t see from Nelson after this momentous win is a hint of boastfulness. In fact, you really don’t even hear much confidence that his wild and speedy Warriors, who are fighting to make the play-offs in the most competitive conference in league history, could ever pull off such a feat again.

“We got the ball where we wanted—most of the time,” he tells reporters, Swedish blue eyes sparkling behind eyelids that always seem to be in semi-slumber, hands “as big as television sets” (in the words of Chronicle sports columnist Bruce Jenkins) arrayed in front of him. “It was really a good game, I suppose, to be in. We had to play well over our heads to win it.”

This low-key response surprises no one in the room. Nelson, whom most people call Nellie, is famous among basketball fans and his friends for many things: his beer gut, his hotheaded courtside manner, his charming honesty with his players and the public, the outrageous pace at which his teams run and shoot, Merry Trickster inventions like the Hack-a-Shaq (bear-hugging a terrible free-throw shooter wherever he is on the court to force him to shoot fouls), his outsize ego and tragically Shakespearean clashes with stars (Chris Webber, Patrick Ewing) and owners (Mark Cuban), his attraction to discarded players, and his love of cold, hard cash. But at age 68, after almost three decades as an NBA coach, Nelson has let his edges soften. What’s left in sharp relief is the distinctive way he always thinks about his teams, his players, and himself: We ain’t that great. But if we all overachieve, well, you never know.

Nelson may paint himself as an underdog, but few NBA coaches have ever achieved more. For those who are counting, he has the second most coaching wins in league history. He is a force within the league who has mentored other great coaches and rewritten the rule book. By the time of the win over the Celtics, he has already pulled his fourth rabbit out of his hat, taking yet another franchise—the Milwaukee Bucks in the late 1970s, the Warriors in the late 1980s, the Dallas Mavericks in the late 1990s, and now the home team once again—from cellar dweller to outrageously entertaining and owner-enriching winner. All these teams, if not championship material, have packed enough featherweight dance in their step

to upset first- or second-place heavyweights, largely by fatiguing and confusing them.

I am trailing Nelson for the season’s stretch drive, and it’s already been quite a ride. His team runs faster and shoots more quickly, from farther distances, than any other team in the league. On defense, his players steal the ball a lot. So for 10-minute spans in which everything goes right, they can score more points than other teams can score in 20 or 30 minutes. Except when they don’t—then they often get abused and are capable of losing to anyone. “Golden State ain’t dangerous,” NBA commentator and former star Charles Barkley told viewers at one point during the year. “They’re just fun to watch.”

That’s one opinion. But in 2007, in his first season after taking over a Warriors team that had suffered 12 straight losing seasons since he had last coached them to the play-offs, they pulled off the biggest play-off upset in league history by knocking off the league’s top team, the Mavericks. In year two of the Nellie revival, I am watching the team again play better than almost anyone predicted. They haven’t stopped breaking attendance records, and you can find fans sporting their “We Believe” tees all over the world.

During a game such as tonight’s, when the Warriors not only play radically differently from any other team but also look beautiful doing it, it’s easy to see why. They score 119 points, the second most against the defensive-minded Celtics all season. They win when Baron Davis—the sensitive guard who, before being revived by his partnership with Nellie, represented mostly trouble to other coaches—confidently buries a fallaway jump shot with zero time left on the clock, sending the arena into bedlam. Watching Nellie’s teams when they’re in the flow is like watching a sports car that’s winning a race, even though everyone knows it’s made of parts that could fail at any moment. It’s pure adrenaline and (sorry, Charles) dangerous.

Despite numerous occasions like this, however, Nellie has never come close to achieving the big result—an NBA championship—and this failure has annoyed fans and team owners who would prefer a coach who was more, well, normal. The conservative coaching style that wins championships stresses high-percentage shots, physical defense, strong inside play, and ironclad roles for every player. That’s not Nellieball, which is why his critics have accused him of building his rosters to play the way he likes, rather than the traditional winning way.

This may or may not be fair. But Nellie has always clung to his unorthodoxy like it’s a buoy in stormy seas. Especially since arriving here and setting out to build his last-chance team around veterans Stephen Jackson and Baron Davis—though Davis has since jumped to the Los Angeles Clippers—and superstar hopefuls Andris Biedrins and Monta Ellis, Nellie has only become less conventional.

His upcoming third season as coach, for instance, poses a bunch of questions. How the 22-year-old Ellis, a scrawny Southerner who plays basketball

like he’s trying to break Olympic track records, will fare as Davis’s replacement as floor leader. How the team can possibly win games during the two months Ellis is supposed to be sidelined with an injured leg. And whether it’ll indeed be Nellie’s last season. (He says yes, though he feinted at retirement last season before accepting $5 million to return.) Yet, though he’s been around forever and presumably should be easy to read by now, how Nelson will answer any of these questions is virtually anyone’s guess.

“The only thing predictable about him is unpredictability,” says Lori Hoye, a scorekeeper who has worked for the Warriors for more than 20 years. “People talk about how he thinks outside of the box,” assistant coach and longtime Nelson friend Larry Riley tells me. “I’ll go further than that: There is no box.”

Why hasn’t Nellie ever done it the way he was expected to? It’s not easy to psychoanalyze sports legends, especially when they’re hard drinkers from the Midwest. As amiable as he is with most of the press, Nellie often dodges personal questions. When, during one of the few one-on-one interviews he gives me, I ask him several questions in a row about himself and his personal relationships with players, he gets flustered and annoyed. “All I want to do is win,” he stammers. “That’s all I got.”

But that’s not all Nellie’s got. Not even close.

By the time Nelson retired, the unsung sixth man was one of three players in NBA history to score 10,000 points but never make an All-Star team. The Celtics honored him by raising his number 19 jersey into the rafters. (Photo by Dick Raphael/NBAE/Getty Images)

In a labyrinthine way, masked by his droll intelligenceand the twists and turns in his story, Nelson’s career has actually been a tale with the firmest American moral, stemming from a pure, almost corny hope: that, with hard work, a poor nobody from nowhere could go farther than anyone thought was possible.

In a one-room, seven-child schoolhouse in bucolic northwestern Illinois, the kid in the back of the classroom with grubby clothes, starlight-blond hair, and no shoes—that was Don. Occasionally, he and his two siblings went without Novocain at the dentist; that’s just one way his father, Arvid, cut corners during hard times. Arvid was one of seven children, the son of an alcoholic farmer descended from Swedish immigrants. He was unusually bright and always wanted to go to school, but he was forced by circumstance to maintain his family’s hog farm. His bitterness about life’s hard ways kept him and Don from getting close. In the 1940s, when Don was still in elementary school, his father had to sell the farm—he’d already slaughtered Don’s pet pig for lack of food—and the family tried its luck in Rock Island, Illinois, where Arvid would eventually find work at the local arsenal.

Arvid didn’t like basketball and didn’t see it as real work. But by the time Nelson was 13, the kid was pushing 6 feet, 2 inches. Scouting for potential, junior high school coach Bob

Riley picked him out of a crowd and demonstrated how to shoot a hook shot. He then handed the ball to Nelson. “He took two steps and fell flat on his face,” remembers 89-year-old Riley, laughing. “He wasn’t the most coordinated athlete. But he could work. Boy, could he work.”

Even on the hottest summer days, Nelson could be found at the YMCA, practicing basketball for hours with friends before working out by having neighborhood kids hang off each arm while he tried to lift them. “Hardest worker I ever saw,” recalls Nelson’s teammate and dear friend Joel Novak, who went on to play with Nelson in college and is now an Iowa district court judge. “He had this unbelievable quiet drive.” Eventually, he became very good at the game.

Nelson’s religious life was as strong as his work ethic: church every Sunday, and no drinking, smoking, or swearing. He went steady with the same pious girl, Sharon (whom he later married), through most of high school. Nelson’s only rebellious indulgence was occasionally driving his parents’ old beater through the park when it was covered in snow, skidding out to avoid trees. “That was busting out for Don,” Novak remembers.

Even if Nelson wasn’t a typical jock, the shy, gawky teen, still playing under Coach Riley, soon became his high school’s first basketball star. “The Big Swede!” fans called out to him as he outscored just about every other kid in the state. No one could out-rebound Nelson, either, which complemented Riley’s “run-and-gun” style of forced turnovers and quick shots. The system was innovative, and Nelson and Novak worked so well together that a state championship seemed imminent in their senior year. But Rock Island’s hopes were dashed by Galesburg, a team that didn’t pass or shoot during most of the game, killing the fast pace. It is a strategy that other teams try on Nelson even now.Galesburg held the final score below 30, and the mop-topped Swede never found his rhythm, missing a key layup with 10 seconds to go and, after a final Gales­burg basket, watching helplessly as the refs ignored Riley’s time-out call, letting the game end.

Four years later, Nellie again failed to win the big one. He and Novak were seniors at the University of Iowa under another run-and-gun coach. Nellie had enjoyed three straight years as team MVP, averaging more than 20 points a game. All that eluded him was a victory over Ohio State and his rival, Jerry Lucas, for the Big 10 championship—but in the final game, Lucas scored over Nelson’s reaching arms. Nelson countered in the final seconds, but his own shot rolled in and out just as the buzzer sounded. In what he would later describe as his most embarrassing moment in sports, Sharon’s parents, already the grandparents of Nelson’s toddler, asked him to go into the Ohio State locker room to get Lucas’s autograph. They were fans.

After college, Nelson was drafted 19th overall by the

Chicago Zephyrs, where he averaged seven per game; then he went to the Lakers, where his production waned to two points a game. When the Lakers finally let him go after two seasons, Nelson stayed in shape and waited for someone in the NBA to call. But not having finished his degree, he was looking at his old summer job: tarring roofs.

But Celtics coach Red Auerbach called Nelson over the summer of 1965 to offer him a bargain-basement $11,000, one-year contract. Auerbach, known by many as the greatest coach in basketball history, used a system that, with just seven offensive plays, necessitated players who could run, make quick decisions, and hit the open shot when they had it.

Nellie, who’d just been waiting to adopt the run-and-shoot style again, averaged about 10 points and five boards a game in his first year. With the all-time great big man Bill Russell leading the team, the Celtics won the title. For the next 10 years, Nelson was an unsung part of the Celtics’ juggernaut, coming early to practice to discuss game philosophy with Auerbach, staying late to take extra shots, and maintaining his 10 or so per game. He was a heady player who used craftiness more than athleticism. Thanks to a coach looking for an underdog and a good value, Nellie had overcome the odds.

March 23, 14 games to go: During pregame warm-ups at Staples Center, the Warriors appear overmatched. With their comparatively small frames and disorderly mien, they resemble a high school team; while on the opposite end of the court, the towering Lakers, the Western Conference’s dominant team, throw down dunks single file. The disparity is partly the fault of Nelson, seated on the sidelines in a black blazer and T-shirt—along with the guy who hired him, team vice president (and former Nellie star) Chris Mullin, he decides whom to employ.

Though he says he would play differently if he had a great big man—the San Antonio Spurs’ Tim Duncan, for example—Nellie clearly leans toward smaller players. One day after practice, he explains that he has always favored fast teams built around the high-quality players who are easiest to find: midsize guards and forwards. “To win this league, you’ve got to have three superstar players, and you’ve got to have an inside presence,” he acknowledges with a nonchalant shrug. “That’s not our forte.”

Tonight, we see what is. In the first half, the Warriors’ quick hands convert 14 Lakers turnovers into 25 points, as three archetypal Nelson players who can handle almost any position—Stephen Jackson, Baron Davis, and Kelenna Azubuike—rain down six bombs from three-point land, while Davis and Ellis convert long jump–style layups over Lamar Odom’s bald head. By halftime, the Warriors have piled on 72 points (an amount some teams don’t score in an entire game), while the Lakers have barely kept up with 49. This, friends, is Nellieball.

So is this: In the fourth quarter, the Warriors look like staggering marathoners in the last event of an Ironman. The soon-to-be league MVP, Kobe Bryant, has taken advantage, scoring 27 in the second half, and he brings his team within one point with just 30 seconds left. It appears that the Warriors will blow yet

another huge lead. Then, with 8 seconds left, Jackson drops in a preposterously low-percentage 27-foot, game-ending three-pointer that even prompts Jack Nicholson to venture from his seat. “You were the better Jack tonight,” Nicholson whispers in Jackson’s ear.

Jackson is a perfect example of a Nellie creation. While playing for the Indiana Pacers, the brazen Texan fired a pistol into the air, was charged with a felony count of criminal recklessness, and looked like a player coaches should avoid. Nellie snatched him up. It was the key moment in the Warriors’ revival. After Nellie’s return, they’d been losers for the first half of the year. Then Jackson arrived, and everything changed. Given the green light to shoot whenever he was open—the philosophy that should be emblazoned on Nellie’s gravestone—Jackson has averaged nearly 20 points per game, five higher than his last year in Indiana, and the team has won nearly 60 percent of its games.

Even when Jackson embarrassingly lost control of his temper—he got ejected in 2007 during a play-off game and was then fined $50,000 for refusing to leave the court—Nellie only doubled down on his long shot, naming Jackson cocaptain months later. “He’s got some emotions to work on,” Nelson told reporters. “Don’t we all.” Given leadership responsibility at the moment when he least expected it, Jackson became the most poised Warrior: funny, charming, a great teammate, and most recently quite the philanthropist. Somehow, he told me, Nelson understands him. During practices, when Nelson isn’t circling the court with a combination of John Wayne swagger and Eeyore-like mosey, the two scrappers often have an arm around each other as they discuss strategy.

To cognoscenti, Jackson’s improbable rise solidified Nelson’s already imposing rep as the Warren Buffett of basketball, a man who can snatch up a player whose stock has dropped 50 percent and remake him. When he was a young coach with the Bucks, Nelson acquired huge center Bob Lanier, whom everyone considered finished after serious knee surgeries, and Lanier helped the team to five consecutive division titles. But Nelson’s eye for scouting young unknowns with unconventional skills is even more legendary. He drafted 6-foot Tim Hardaway, who no one thought could shoot, and Hardaway made the Warriors a national sensation. While running the Mavericks, he passed up or traded high-profile players like Paul Pierce to grab Dirk Nowitzki, a lightly regarded German, and Steve Nash, a slight Canadian who looked more like a pro golfer. The two became superstars and league MVPs.

The only thing these stars have in common is that none of them looked like stars. It’s as if each time Nelson faces a key player choice, he tries to send the world a coded message: All that glitters is not gold. Donnie Nelson, Nellie’s son, told me a story of a Christmas Day in the 1960s when he was racing his new Hot Wheels over the kitchen floor. His towering father, who was rarely home due to his NBA playing schedule, asked Donnie for his worst car, “the

one that you’re ready to throw away.” Donnie knew which one it was: the brown dump truck with the nearly broken wheels. He handed it over, and Nellie walked away. Thirty minutes later, his dad came back with the truck. It was unrecognizable: The wheels were fixed and the axles greased, and even the body looked shiny. There was a fishing weight in the cab. Donnie looked at his remade Hot Wheel in awe and pitted it against his fastest car. The dump truck won easily.

(Learn more about Don Nelson's historic battles in "Nellie against the world.")

March 28, 11 games to go: The San Francisco skyline is visible through the cloud of cigar smoke as Nellie, puffing away on the rooftop of the Warriors’ practice facility, is asked by reporters about big man Chris Webber’s retiring as a Warrior. The team picked up the fading Webber about two months ago, but the five-time All-Star reinjured his knee during practice and, at age 35, realized it was time to quit. So everyone now wants to know if the Webber acquisition was more symbolic than practical, image control that would allow Nelson and Webber, nemeses during the Warriors’ 1990s heyday, to both retire in peace.

“I didn’t do it for any of those reasons,” says Nelson. “I did it because I thought he could help us on the floor, and I thought we’d get along fine once he got here.”

The long-ago Webber episode and the Patrick Ewing disaster that followed are never far from the minds of Nellie critics, because each situation supports the theory that Nellie is prone to subconscious self-sabotage. Webber and Ewing were both great big men whom Nellie couldn’t get along with, possibly because neither was an authentic underdog. Perhaps winning with them would have botched Nelson’s up-from-nowhere narrative.

By 1976, when he retired as a player, Nelson had won five championship rings and paid off his house, yet he was anything but rich. In most years, he made around $30,000, and he still drove Red Auerbach’s hand-me-down Buick. His marriage was also on the rocks. The NBA lifestyle that scored Wilt Chamberlain 20,000 women had rubbed off on this pious Christian boy. (He later found out that he had fathered a daughter with a stewardess he had met during a road trip.) His accountant said Nelson couldn’t send his four kids to college. “He was always worried about money, trying to stay ahead,” says Donnie, who remembers moonlighting with his dad at YMCAs and Rotary Clubs where Nelson would give brief speeches, tossing out the same three jokes for $100 a pop. “Failure simply wasn’t an option.”

At a crossroads, Nellie called a family meeting to report on the three options he saw for his

future: car salesman, referee, or coaching assistant. The kids voted for car sales or coaching. The former paid more, but Nellie couldn’t walk away from the game that had given him everything so far. He took an assistant job, under head coach Larry Costello, with one of the league’s worst teams, the Milwaukee Bucks.

In an oddly providential twist, Costello lost all but 3 of his first 18 games and was canned. The Bucks asked Nelson, known for his strategic wit, to take the helm. But Nellie, just 36, said he needed at least three more years to be ready for that. The Bucks asked again. “No, thank you,” said Nellie, and they gave him an ultimatum: Take the job or take a hike. So, less than a year out of the league, Nellie became an unprepared head coach and director of player personnel who lost 10 of his first 11 games and ultimately finished last.

Hitting bottom was familiar, though. His family found him passed out in the living room chair a lot of mornings, a game tape sticking halfway out of the VCR after Nelson had spent another sleepless night brooding over how to turn things around. Eventually, those nights led to a key decision: Stop listening to anyone else. “He was losing games, anyway,” remembers Donnie. “He said, ‘If I’m going to go to the gallows, I’m going to do it my way.’ And that’s when it all started—that’s when he became the Don Nelson we know.”

It was the defining moment. As a coach, he made his first step toward his signature style, trading 6-foot, 11-inch rebounder Swen Nater for a draft pick that Nellie used to nab 6-foot, 7-inch Marques Johnson, a small forward who quickly became one of the league’s top scorers. The following year, Nelson’s first full season as coach, the Bucks shocked the league, sliding into the play-offs and sweeping the Phoenix Suns in the first round, kicking off a long string of first-round surprises that Nelson would achieve with almost all his teams. Meanwhile, he became a motivator and, like Auerbach, sometimes a screamer. “He was very tough,” recalls Sidney Moncrief, one of the Bucks’ stars, who now helps coach the Warriors, “but never too tough.” Even Joel Novak and Jim Tucker, his two closest friends, admit that they were surprised by how quickly necessity turned their friend from a quiet farm boy into a vocal and dynamic leader. “It was almost like you’re a commander in World War II,” says Donnie, “and you find yourself in the Black Forest, doing something totally
different. He had to find his own way completely.”

He gradually pieced together a grab bag of discoveries (Moncrief, Paul Pressey) and has-beens (Bob Lanier) to construct a team that played fast, yet still led the league in defense. Nelson broke rules, garnering respect for his ability to take advantage of floor matchups and for inventing a novel new position, the so-called point forward (Pressey), who caused headaches for other coaches by taking over offensive quarterbacking duties from the traditional point guard. The dominant Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers continually thwarted Nellie’s championship hopes, but they didn’t stop him from leading the Bucks to 50-win seasons 7 out of 11 times—making him the most winning coach in franchise history—and twice winning the NBA Coach of the Year award. He also gained clout inside the NBA. He helped convince the league to ban defenses where players cover zones rather than individual players, then later argued

successfully to change the rules back, in each instance mastering the new strategies as well as any coach.

“He told me he felt blessed,” recalls Tucker, Nelson’s college roommate. When Nelson finally moved on from Milwaukee in 1988, he followed his good friend Jim Fitzgerald, who’d bought a piece of the Warriors, out to the Bay Area. Flying high, he related effortlessly with his players—most notably helping Chris Mullin kick the bottle—and made the Warriors a perennial play-off team for the first time since the mid-’70s. Though the team lacked a good big man, in 1993 a Ping-Pong ball landed on the Warriors’ lottery number, and Nelson won the right to nab Chris Webber, a hulking powerhouse from the University of Michigan with the speed of a guard.

But Webber’s reputation was as a relatively affluent prep-school kid whom the press loved—the opposite of the players Nellie gravitates toward. He lacked street cred, says KNBR sports commentator Ralph Barbieri. “Chris was self-conscious about that,” he says, “and tried to act tough to make up for it.” Webber denies that analysis, but some sort of serious clash was obvious to everyone early on. If there is one thing real underdogs hate, it’s people who fake it; if there’s one thing guys groping for respect hate, it’s being called out. Once Webber responded to a typical Nelson midgame blowup by screaming right back, “Treat me like a man!” When Webber leaked stories to a prominent reporter that painted Nelson in a Machiavellian light, “all of a sudden, the whole locker room was divided,” recalls for­mer sports reporter Ron Bergman, now one of Nellie’s friends. After a brutal standoff, Webber jumped ship, forcing a trade to the Washington Bullets, and War­riors fans who’d loved their coach were chanting, “Nellie must go!” By season’s end, he was fired, landing at the New York Knicks, where, as fate would have it, he collided fiercely with a second top big man, Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing. He was basically run out of a second town.

Today, back on the rooftop, Nelson isn’t having any theorizing when I inquire, “Is there any part of you that likes being eighth, rather than first?” “Nooo,” he says, giving me what I interpret as a “screw you” glance. “I’d rather be number one.”

April 6, 6 games to go: “I’m not changing the game plan,” Nelson sputters, as he paces through the locker room in New Orleans during halftime, the players watching him with somber eyes. “The game plan’s solid.” Nelson appears to

have put on a few pounds in the five months since the season’s start owing to stress and insomnia, “like he usually does,” his lawyer and friend John O’Connor noted to me earlier in the season. “You see him balloon up.”

Last night was likely sleepless because the Warriors, who are 46–30, are tied with the Denver Nuggets for the final play-off spot, so every game feels do-or-likely-die. Nelson has been almost depressingly candid about how badly he wants to make the play-offs. “It would be so exciting to be in it,” he said quietly at a recent practice—although he reined himself in instantly, as always, by reminding reporters that the team might not succeed.

It might strike television viewers as strange that Nellie doesn’t want to change a game plan that he described simply as “make threes.” In their last game in New Orleans against the Hornets, the Warriors made 13 three-point shots and won, so the urge wasn’t crazy. But this time, in the first two quarters they’ve gone 1 for 12 from behind the arc. Why not switch things up a little? But heeding the obvious doesn’t interest Nellie. He’d rather invent his own way to compete and win.

“If he was in a prison and all he had was a rock and a penny,” says Jim Tucker, “he’d make up a game and figure out how to play against the guy in the next cell.” Even negotiating his multimillion-dollar salary contract (twice Nellie has ended up in hefty lawsuits with former owners, and he won them both) is a game of chess for Nellie. “There was the Pac-Man phase,” says Donnie, “then it was pool, shuffleboard, golf, poker. He wants to master every game, then he wants to take the toughest guy at the bar, then he wants to beat him left-handed, and if he gets bored, it’s on to the next game. And when he can’t win, he’ll change the rules, and if that doesn’t work, he’ll change the rules while the ball’s in the air.”

The team shoots 17 more threes after halftime (and makes only two of them), and eventually loses to the Hornets, 108–96. The iconoclast doesn’t triumph tonight, but not too many are complaining. As the Chronicle’s Jenkins puts it, “The Warriors need Nel­lie. They need him like they need air.”

In Dallas, where he landed after the Knicks debacle in 1996, Nellie finally came close to having the talent to win it all. He pulled Steve Nash out of the scrap heap and turned him into the best point guard of his generation, then nabbed Dirk Nowitzki, a taller Larry Bird, from Germany. (He and Donnie, who was his Dallas assistant and has become one of the NBA’s top executives, were among the first to recognize that the next NBA stars would be international.) But again, he couldn’t resist a power struggle, this time with the guy paying the bills, tech billionaire gone basketball fanatic Mark Cuban, who bought the Mavericks in 2000. Not unlike Webber, Cuban was young and liked to play the big shot. His instinct was to buy a championship team with high-profile trades, rather than follow Nellie’s value-investing approach.

The tension didn’t come to a head, though, until a crucial game in the 2003 Western Conference finals, with the season on the line. Nowitzki had suffered sprained ligaments in his left knee, but was cleared by a team doctor to play. Cuban demanded that the German go in, but Nelson, who’d suffered the same injury, said a reinjury could be career ending. Having told Nowitzki’s parents that he would look after him “like a son,” Nelson refused to play his 24-year-old discovery. According to O’Conner, Nelson’s lawyer, Cuban growled,

“You’re just looking for excuses to lose.”

When Cuban let Nash go to Phoenix in 2004 without even telling Nellie about it, that was enough. Nellie walked. “After losing Nash the way we lost him, I sort of fell out of love with the game,” he remembers. His friends knew his retirement wouldn’t last. At a roast in fall 2005, one of Nellie’s dear friends, the coaching great Gregg Popovich, reportedly joked, “I look forward to seeing all of you in four or five years, when we have the next Nellie retirement party in another town.” Less than a year later, Chris Mullin, struggling as the Warriors’ general manager, called his former coach. “I’m planning on one more job,” Nelson admitted.

About a month later, Nelson and his loyal assistant coach Larry Riley were driving Nelson’s pickup truck from Dallas back to California—the coach’s terrier, Lucky, lounging in the front seat, country music blaring—discussing how they were going to turn around the hapless Warriors one more time.

April 10, 4 games to go: “Yes, it’s a big game,” Nellie jokes to reporters, as the room cracks up at the understatement. It’s just before the biggest game of the season, against Denver, and if they don’t win, Nelson will certainly be watching the play-off on his “nice TV” in his house in the Maui town of Kihei. He and his second wife, Joy, have an open living room there that’s the size of a small ice-skating rink, granite-topped kitchen counters raised to accommodate Nelson’s height, a 25-yard lap pool, a hot tub and wading tub, and shuffleboard and pool tables. All three bedrooms have ocean views. Who in Rock Island would’ve expected this?
Despite the pressure, Nellie is enjoying himself. He gives a TV reporter grief for asking questions during the print reporters’ session. He joshes, “Well, I don’t discuss game plans with the media. You’ll go run over and tell George,” referring to opposing coach George Karl. It never ceases to amaze the people around him that as much as Nellie obsesses about winning, he’s now able to relax. “That’s what he’s showed me more than anything,” assistant coach Keith Smart tells me. “The game’s intense, the game’s high pressure, but you can still make this thing enjoyable.”

Over in the Nuggets’ locker room, Karl sits with his own group of reporters. He’s one of many coaches who have viewed Nellie’s brazen footsteps as the ones to follow. “He takes chances that very few coaches take. I mean, in the middle of the game, he’ll throw something out there.”

The examples are legion and frequently entertaining: Nellie has often put five guards on the floor at the same time. For a whole year back in the 1980s, he encouraged Manute Bol, the beanpole 7-foot, 7-inch Warrior from Sudan, to shoot 28-foot three-point shots—just for the hell of it. This year, no matter how sluggish the team has looked, he has still treated his rookies like ball boys, rarely rotating them in, and then only doing so with a confounding haphazardness that no one but him understands. “Nellie’s

playing a rookie, take a picture,” I hear a television commentator say during one game.

“Has Nellie been innovative to a flaw?” I ask Karl, who smiles at the question. Karl is another great coach who’s never won the whole enchilada. “At the end of the season, he’s squeezed the most out of his team,” he says. “That doesn’t mean you always win. In the NBA, you might surprise one round, but you’re not going to surprise three or four rounds. You have to have the skills and talent.”

With these Warriors, Nellie’s got neither quality in enough supply, and knows it. Even before tonight’s game, he politely takes the torch of blame from his team, who have played their hearts out for him. “Players win games,” Nellie tells us. “Coaches lose games.”

Still, it’s not fair to say that Nelson loses this one. The crowd screams with fully believing hearts as the Warriors finish the first quarter up by 15. But soon the Warriors’ sloppy turnovers allow Nuggets stars Carmelo Anthony and Allen Iverson far too many easy shots, and the Warriors slowly lose the game by attrition. The players leave the court silently.

Part of me doesn’t even want to attend the postgame press conference with Nellie. Having seen how badly he wanted this game, and the play-offs, I half expect him to smash a bottle of Dewar’s against the wall, order us all out of the room, and break down in tears. As he plops down behind the microphones, though, he seems more composed than any of the heavyhearted fans.

“What a great setting for a game,” he says, as if treating the press conference like another game where he’ll score points with shock value. “Crowd was into it. Loved the first quarter. First half even.” Of course, Nellie lets us all know the Warriors were the underdogs. “They’ve got a heck of a team. You look at their roster. They are as good as anybody in the West,” he says of the Nuggets, a patent lie.

But even so, you see more sincerity than spin in his humility. For a moment, I imagine Nellie in Maui when he finally does retire, a Cuban tucked into those Steven Tyler lips, a double scotch at his side, and a group of retired NBA lifers sitting with him, playing cards and telling stories. In my vision, Nelson’s pile of poker chips is twice as big as anyone else’s. But he’s not gloating. He’s worked hard. He deserves every bit of it.

The press conference winds down. Especially his closing words seem genuine, summing up a contest and a career. “I loved the game. I loved every part of it. Except I wish we’d played a little better.”

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Jaimal Yogis is a San Francisco contributing writer. His last feature for the magazine, “Are We Backing the Right Fix for Global Warming?,” appeared in December 2007.