Don Nelson, always the iconoclast, said he didn’t have a big celebration planned Wednesday night after the former Warriors coach learned earlier in the day that he’d been elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
“I’m going over to Willie Nelson’s house tonight to play poker,” Nelson said with a laugh. “How about that?”
Although the official inductee announcement won’t be made until Monday, Nelson broke the news himself when he told ESPN midday that he received the call that he’s headed to the Hall. He confirmed the news with this newspaper Wednesday night.
“Very seldom do people get to do something they love to do their whole life,” Nelson said. “But I’m a lucky guy to stay in the business as long as I did. This is just frosting on the cake. It doesn’t get any better than going into the Hall of Fame.”
The 71-year-old Nelson, who left the NBA after the 2010 season with a league-record 1,335 coaching victories, was among 12 finalists for induction. He was joined on the finalists list by Jamaal Wilkes, Bernard King and Ralph Sampson, each of whom played with Golden State.
Even though he amassed the highest all-time win total during a 31-year coaching career, Nelson had been snubbed by the Hall in recent years largely as a result of having never won an NBA title as a coach. But he did get his teams to the playoffs in 18 seasons, including five times with the Warriors in two different stints.
“Even though I’ve been nominated a lot, I had a good feeling about it this time, I don’t know why,” Nelson said. “I thought maybe that now that I’m retired, it could happen. So many people deserve to be in there before I do, of course, like my buddy Al Attles and guys like Bill Fitch. I feel unworthy of the award, but it sure is nice to have it.”
Nelson is the only coach to take the Warriors to the playoffs during the past 35 years since Attles did it in 1975-76, and the only one of the last 14 Warriors coaches to do so.
Perhaps the most dramatic trip to the postseason came in his second term with Golden State in 2006-07. Hired by one of his former players, then general manager Chris Mullin, Nelson guided the team to its first winning record and playoff appearance since his last full-season go-round with the team in 1993-94. The Warriors not only made the playoffs for the first time in 13 years, they upset the Western Conference top seed Dallas Mavericks – a team Nelson had coached the previous eight seasons – before losing to Utah in the conference semifinals.
Oakland’s Don Barksdale, who was the NBA’s first African-American All-Star, was among those elected into this year’s Hall class on Feb. 24.
