Former Dallas Mavericks head coach Don Nelson talks with Dirk Nowitzki on the sideline during the first half of Game 5 of the Western Conference semifinals on May 14, 2001 in San Antonio.
Michael Mulvey/File photo/The Dallas Morning News
Midway through the wretched winter of ’97, coming off a game where he posted more fouls and turnovers (seven) than points and rebounds (five), Oliver Miller didn’t have much of a case to play more minutes than the 14 the Mavs allowed. But our Brad Townsend asked anyway. Just good journalism, is what it was.
Miller told Brad he didn’t care. The way he said it indicated he was talking about more than his minutes on a bad Mavs team in a decade full of them. Terry Davis thought so, anyway. He tried desperately to get his teammate to back off the sentiment, but Miller insisted.
“Write that,” he told Brad, who dutifully obliged.
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As a result, the Big O, who’d been a great player at Fort Worth Southwest and Arkansas and certainly had his moments over a nine-year NBA career, is best remembered here as the first player in Mavs history to be fired during an introductory presser.
“I read where Miller said he doesn’t care anymore,” Don Nelson said his first day as general manager, “and I don’t want people like that around.
“I don’t want anybody on my basketball team who doesn’t care.”
The knee-jerk reaction made the new GM’s position clear: The long slide from model franchise in the ’80s through a difficult adolescence in the ’90s was officially over. From making the conference finals in 1988 to becoming the losingest team in the league a decade later, they’d gone through five head coaches. Nellie would make it six when he replaced Jim Cleamons nine months later with himself.
Never has such a blatant act of self-promotion worked out so well for a long-suffering public.
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Before leaving the Mavs in 2005, Nellie, who died Sunday at 86, would take the Mavs back to the playoffs for the first time in more than a decade. He was the reason for the turnaround. The coach who once owned more wins than anyone in league history gave the organization clarity and credibility, ushering in the modern era of basketball with the game’s first true stretch 4. And if he never won it all anywhere in a decorated career, he left this franchise with the centerpiece of its only championship roster.
His distinctive my-way-or-the-highway approach would also arrive at a point where he and the owner stopped talking altogether. Which explains how Mark Cuban found out that his head coach had gone in for shoulder surgery and given the reins to his assistant, Avery Johnson. Cuban heard the news like everyone else.
For that matter, no one would have accused Nellie of being a workaholic during his stop in Dallas. He liked having a good time. Even during games. Jodie Valade, who covered the Mavs for The Dallas Morning News back in the day, recalled that once, after drawing up a play during a timeout, he autographed it and handed it to her. When Shaquille O’Neal called him a “clown” for the “Hack-a-Shaq” ploy that bedeviled the giant, Nellie sported a red nose the next time they played the Lakers. Even his revolutionary mismatches were essentially just a fun way to play basketball.
Of course, it helps to cement your position as a certified genius when you have material like Dirk Nowitzki. Few saw it coming when the Mavs traded for Dirk’s draft rights. Nellie believed in Dirk because his son, Donnie, did. Not that they were taking any chances.
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Nellie once joked they hid Dirk in Donnie’s basement in the weeks leading up to the draft. Not that it was hyperbole. They outfoxed their peers by first negotiating with Dirk’s mentor/Svengali/saxophone coach, Holger Geschwindner. They also may or may not have spread rumors about a possible German Army commitment.
As large as Dirk looms in Dallas sports history, it’s easy to forget that he wasn’t exactly an overnight sensation. Didn’t make an All-Star team until his fourth season. Nellie gave him the room to grow into greatness, as Dirk acknowledged in his tribute this week.
Dirk also owes Nellie for protecting him in the 2003 conference finals, when a knee sprain forced him to the bench in Game 3 against San Antonio. Cuban was incensed. Nellie reasoned that Dirk’s future was more important than a game, even one of the biggest in franchise history. Still, the rub between owner and coach would fester.
Fair to say that Nellie’s drive had sputtered, too, especially after Cuban let Steve Nash walk. After leaving Dallas, he came back with the Warriors, exacting a little revenge with a first-round upset of his former team.
In a delightful piece for DMagazine this week, David Moore, another SportsDay letterman, recounted the celebration at Nellie’s Oakland condo afterward:
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The first person I saw behind the bar when I walked through the door was Owen Wilson. He was with Kate Hudson, who then walked away to talk to Nelson’s wife, Joy. Upon rendevousing with Nelson, the coach introduced me to Luke Wilson. Then Nelson yelled, “Woody, come over here and meet David Moore.” Woody Harrelson was rightfully unimpressed but cordial as we talked, although I must say his assertion that he didn’t smoke as much pot as he once did was not in effect that evening.
No coach of his stature enjoyed the good life more than the man who occasionally played golf barefoot in his island paradise. Eddie Sefko, yet another SportsDay alum, once drew the plum assignment of visiting Nellie in Maui, where he observed a long night of poker at the Nelson estate.
Willie’s, not Don’s.
Sefko tweeted this week that it was “probably the wildest night of my writing career.” No doubt. He took us places we’d never been in the short time he was here. For that, we still owe him.