NBA PLAYOFFS : He Can Do a Lot With Just a Little : Nelson Has Gone Against the Grain to Gain an Edge

Don Nelson hates this story.

It’s about what a smart guy he is. If such a thing occurs to him, too, he’s old school enough to get embarrassed at being asked to cite the influences who made him the ace he is today.

Instead you get a few answers and several suggestions to “write about my players.”

OK. His players, the Golden State Warriors, trail the Lakers, 1-0, going into tonight’s Game 2 at the Forum. Nelson is going to have to discover a hole in the Laker fortifications large enough to drive a busload of his urban guerrillas through or play catch-up in earnest.

If he can’t locate a breach, it won’t be for lack of looking. In two days, he has seen so much Laker videotape he probably knows more about Earvin Johnson Jr. than Earvin Johnson Sr. does.

But if there’s the tiniest opening, the NBA’s most imaginative mind will light up like a pinball machine.

Remember the San Antonio series, in which he employed a “point center” to lure David Robinson out to lunch so the seventh-seeded Warriors could beat the Spurs? Remember Utah in ‘89, when his three- and four-guard lineups made Mark Eaton disappear the same way in a 3-0 stunner?

Only three of 16 No. 7-seeded teams have advanced since the NBA began this format, and Nelson has had two of them in three seasons.

He’s a two-time coach of the year and might have become the first three-timer except that he has raised his game so high it’s hard to outdo himself.

He has never won an NBA title as a coach or taken a team to the NBA finals. But if the test is, as Bum Phillips once said, to take his’n and beat your’n and then take your’n and beat his’n, the answer is uh-huh. You got the right one, baby.

HOW YOU GONNA KEEP HIM DOWN ON THE FARM?

“I remember, we were sitting at a Maid-Rite (hamburger stand) in Moline, Ill., all our family. He says, ‘Well, I’ve got three options. I can become an NBA referee.’ We all kind of vetoed that one.

“He said, ‘I can go into some kind of business. Or Milwaukee offered me an assistantship under Larry Costello.’ We all said the last one. That’s what he ended up doing.” --DONN NELSON, Warrior assistant.

First, Don Nelson loved basketball.

Making a living from it was heaven, even if a living was all someone like Nelson could make in those days, and barely.

With a wife, two sons and two daughters, he had to augment his salary with public appearances. Donn, 28, remembers driving with his father to half the boys’ clubs and YMCAs in New England.

Nelson the elder may have stood a sturdy 6-feet-5 and been an All-American center at Iowa, but as an NBA forward, he was small, slow and clung to a career . . . for 14 seasons. The last 11 were in Boston, Red Auerbach having recognized his brains and toughness and installed him in one of those Celtic roles.

In appreciation and fascination, Nelson visited Auerbach’s office before games--”I’d walk in during his nap”--to talk basketball.

Nelson’s surprising plan to referee was one more piece of that puzzle--anything he could think of to stay in The Life.

“I think I had to learn to do that to survive,” Nelson says. “I had to find some way to cheat because of my skill level--find a wrinkle here, a wrinkle there.”

Says Donn: “He was always on the verge . . . waived by the Lakers (not to mention the Chicago Zephyrs) . . . 12th man on the Celtics.

“When the Lakers let him go, he worked as a roofer in Quad Cities. You can’t get any more blue-collar. He knew what it means to just make it and to just miss it.

“One thing his old man always told him--his old man was a Swede who came over here and had to work real hard--never be afraid to work. Now, he’s never going to get outworked.”

Hearty, outgoing, fun-loving, Nelson was good with people and devoted to the game. If it seemed to occur only belatedly to him that he might coach, others saw it more clearly.

Life is full of surprises.

The assistantship lasted 18 games into the 1977-78 season when the Bucks fired Costello and, to Nelson’s dismay, elevated him.

Asked en route to his first news conference by a reporter if he was ready, Nelson said: “No way.”

Says Donn: “My dad didn’t want any piece of that head coaching job. Then Fitzy (then-Buck owner, now Warrior chairman Jim Fitzgerald) kind of talked him into it. He had no coaching experience.”

In truth, Nelson could tell an X from an O, but that was about it. All those arrows and squiggles were a mystery.

“I didn’t even know how to draw on the blackboard,” Nelson says. “I used to have my assistant do that early in my career.”

As a rookie taking over Costello’s 3-15 team, he went 27-37.

His next season, the Bucks went 44-38.

From his fourth season through his 10th and last in Milwaukee, the Bucks never won fewer than 50 games. He became a folk hero, as much for Nelly’s Farm Fund--driving a tractor around depressed Wisconsin to aid farmers--as for his coaching.

His tenure ended abruptly in a tug-of-war with a new owner, Herb Kohl. Nelson left, intending never to ride the whirlwind of coaching again.

But Fitzgerald had moved to a new downtrodden team that needed first a general manager, then a coach. Guess who?

GRANDMASTER

Just for the record. . . .

Nelson didn’t invent the point forward or point center. It was probably someone a little further back such as Phog Allen, Clair Bee or Dr. James Naismith.

“I don’t think anything he does is original,” says Mike Dunleavy, once Nelson’s pupil, laughing. “I think he steals everything.

“If he’s got a big man who can handle the ball, he’ll put him out front. In Milwaukee, he made a point forward out of Paul Pressey. He had guards who could shoot, like Sidney Moncrief and me, and now he had someone who could take you off the dribble. But in 1976 when I was in Philadelphia, we had Caldwell Jones (a 7-foot center) bring the ball up against Bill Walton. In this game, there are very few things that are original.

“Do I know his mind? (Smiling.) Nobody knows his mind. He doesn’t even know his own mind. I don’t think ultimately he knows what he’s going to do until he does it.

“Then he’ll try something different, just to be different.”

If Nelson isn’t an inventor, however, there is no denying his inventiveness.

The 76ers used Jones to break the Portland press in the ’77 NBA finals. When Jones got over half-court, he would hand the ball to the point guard.

Nelson shattered convention in the mid-1980s by running his offense full time through Pressey, a 6-5 forward.

Similarly, Nelson was hardly the first to double-team defensively.

His Celtics, who scorned such gimmickry, held a famous debate before the seventh game of the ’74 NBA finals, with such hallowed names as Bob Cousy phoning home with advice, leading to the decision to double-team Milwaukee’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which secured another banner.

But Nelson turned a gimmick others used briefly into a basic scheme--double-teaming and rotating--that everyone uses now, making him the father of modern NBA defense.

“I always had strange ideas,” Nelson says. “I probably still do. Some of them work, some of them don’t.

“I came up with the bank pass. We were going to bank the ball against the backboard and get it. It made so much sense because of the size of our big men, Manute (Bol) and Ralph (Sampson). We worked on it all during training camp. . . .

“If we could just have hit the backboard.”

Says University of Utah Coach Rick Majerus, once a Buck assistant: “A lot of guys do what I call the NBA thing. They do the NBA thing in the draft, the NBA thing in trades. Nelly’s not afraid to push the parameters of what others would perceive as acceptable, whether it’s running a point forward or picking Moncrief in the draft ahead of Greg Kelser.

“He’s not afraid of failing. He has a good sense of himself. Nelly knows who he is and he’s happy with himself.”

A wrinkle here, a wrinkle there, the Spurs are watching on TV and the Lakers are trembling in their $200 leisure footwear lest Nelson’s terriers torch them, too.

It’s an interesting life, if not an easy one for the driven few.

“I never have enjoyed it that much,” Nelson says. “It’s a very difficult job.”

It is if you have Nelson’s ambitions. In a business where everyone takes losing hard, Nelson stands out.

“I think Nelly takes it home with him,” Majerus says. “He points the finger at himself. It’s like, ‘We won, but I lost.’ ”

Thus his predicament: Nelson never meant to become the patron saint of smurfdom, but a good big man is hard to find.

Nelson, the wheeler-dealer, reportedly was interested in Benoit Benjamin and Moses Malone before the trade deadline. He would like to play the Lakers and Blazers on even terms and think less.

Until then, he’ll skin the big cats any way he can.

“That’s the part he really likes,” Donn says. “He likes to take his team and figure out its strengths and weaknesses, where we can attack, where we can get by. He’s found out he’s good at it.

“For a guy who grew up in Iowa, who hasn’t graduated from college to find out, ‘Here’s something I can really be good at,’ that’s great for the self-esteem.”

Nowadays, Nelson no longer wears taped-up tennis shoes on the sideline.

He does Pritikin commercials.

You could call him a born-again Californian, but he’s not. Maybe nothing he came up with was wholly original, but he was.

Nelson’s Coaching Record

Regular Season Playoffs* Season Team W L Pct. Pos. W L 1976-77 MILWAUKEE 27 37 .422 6th DNQ DNQ 1977-78 MILWAUKEE 44 38 .537 2nd 5 4 1978-79 MILWAUKEE 38 44 .463 4th DNQ DNQ 1979-80 MILWAUKEE 49 33 .598 1st 3 4 1980-81 MILWAUKEE 60 22 .732 1st 3 4 1981-82 MILWAUKEE 55 27 .671 1st 2 4 1982-83 MILWAUKEE 51 31 .622 1st 5 4 1983-84 MILWAUKEE 50 32 .610 1st 8 8 1984-85 MILWAUKEE 59 23 .720 1st 3 5 1985-86 MILWAUKEE 57 25 .695 1st 7 7 1986-87 MILWAUKEE 50 32 .610 3rd 6 6 1988-89 GOLDEN STATE 43 39 .524 4th 4 4 1989-90 GOLDEN STATE 37 45 .451 5th DNQ DNQ 1990-91 GOLDEN STATE 44 38 .537 4th 3 2 Totals 14 Seasons 664 466 .588 49 52

* Totals before tonight’s Game 2 of Western Conference semifinal series with Lakers.