Don Nelson "Resigns"
The Golden State Warriors will have a new coach (Keith Smart) by the end of the week. Don Nelson will not return to the Warriors bench for the upcoming season as the new owners of the Warriors have sort of forced him out.
Who can blame them after the last couple of seasons? This brings an end to Nelson’s up-and-down tenure with the Warriors, they have had some high moments (as the eighth seed they had a first round upset of the Dallas Mavericks in 2007), and they have had some low moments (29-53 in 2008-09 and 26-56 in 2009-10). It is time for the Warriors to turn over a new leaf and start a new era of basketball.
Don Nelson is the winningest coach in NBA history since he has won 1,335 games in 31 years as a coach. But these regular season wins haven’t really translated into playoff wins and championships because he has won as many NBA championships as a high school freshman basketball coach—zero.
Nelson has been able to establish a type of small ball in his last two pit stops—Dallas and Golden State—and while they have had a fair amount of success as being playoff contenders, they were never title contenders. In fact, Dallas didn’t truly become a title contender until Avery Johnson took control of the team after Nelson left.
His coaching game plan hasn’t really reaped many rewards and he still pushed on with this point-forward, run and gun, uptempo offense. Even in his early coaching days with the Bucks and his first stint with the Warriors in the late '80′s, Nelson enjoyed regular season success, but his team always faltered when it faced physical opposition.
In his year long tenure with the Knicks, Nelson tried to lobby to trade future Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing, and he tried to make the Knicks an uptempo team; a vast change from the hard-nosed defensive team that his predecessor Pat Riley had established in New York. Nelson just never seemed to get that his method didn’t work in the NBA and is better suited for the college game.
This is a great opportunity for the Warriors to move on and rebuild with their young back court of Monta Ellis and Stephen Curry. Along with newly acquired David Lee and Andris Biedrins (albeit, Biedrins is better suited as a backup center rather than a starter), the Warriors are tremendously talented, and if Warriors management can put the right pieces around them, they can have a young nucleus that would rival the Oklahoma City Thunder. It’s up to the new owners to make the right moves that put this franchise back on the path to becoming contenders; that’s something that has eluded them for quite some time.
This is just an opinion…so please Pardon My Bias.
